Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 68, Issue 12, 15 December 2010, Pages 1107-1113
Biological Psychiatry

Archival Report
Basic Abnormalities in Visual Processing Affect Face Processing at an Early Age in Autism Spectrum Disorder

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.06.024Get rights and content

Background

A detailed visual processing style has been noted in autism spectrum disorder (ASD); this contributes to problems in face processing and has been directly related to abnormal processing of spatial frequencies (SFs). Little is known about the early development of face processing in ASD and the relation with abnormal SF processing. We investigated whether young ASD children show abnormalities in low spatial frequency (LSF, global) and high spatial frequency (HSF, detailed) processing and explored whether these are crucially involved in the early development of face processing.

Methods

Three- to 4-year-old children with ASD (n = 22) were compared with developmentally delayed children without ASD (n = 17). Spatial frequency processing was studied by recording visual evoked potentials from visual brain areas while children passively viewed gratings (HSF/LSF). In addition, children watched face stimuli with different expressions, filtered to include only HSF or LSF.

Results

Enhanced activity in visual brain areas was found in response to HSF versus LSF information in children with ASD, in contrast to control subjects. Furthermore, facial-expression processing was also primarily driven by detail in ASD.

Conclusions

Enhanced visual processing of detailed (HSF) information is present early in ASD and occurs for neutral (gratings), as well as for socially relevant stimuli (facial expressions). These data indicate that there is a general abnormality in visual SF processing in early ASD and are in agreement with suggestions that a fast LSF subcortical face processing route might be affected in ASD. This could suggest that abnormal visual processing is causative in the development of social problems in ASD.

Section snippets

Participants

In total, 29 children diagnosed with ASD and 18 control children with developmental delay but without ASD participated. Seven ASD children (of 29) were excluded because they were not compliant with the EEG procedure and one control child was excluded because of medication use. The final groups comprised 22 children with ASD and 17 control subjects. All children had normal or corrected to normal vision. Information on several diagnostic instruments (30, 31, 32) is presented in Table 1. Details

Grating Task: P1 Amplitude and Latency

Grand averages of the P1 are shown in Figure 1. There was a significant interaction between SF and group [F(1,37) = 9.00, p < .01, η2p = .20] for P1. Further analysis of this interaction indicated that in the ASD group HSF gratings elicited significantly higher P1 amplitudes compared with those in response to LSF gratings [t(21) = −2.12, p < .05, η2p = .18], whereas in control subjects the pattern was reversed—LSF gratings evoked higher P1 amplitudes than HSF gratings [t(16) = 2.30, p < .05, η2p

Discussion

Abnormalities in visual perception in ASD, in particular a more detailed-oriented perception, are seen as primary or at least contributory to problems in face processing in ASD (2, 3, 4, 5, 6). However, there is little knowledge on the role of perceptual abnormalities and its influence on face perception in young children with ASD.

In the present study, we investigated a fundamental aspect of vision that is related to detail perception, namely spatial frequency processing, in young children with

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