Elsevier

Brain and Development

Volume 31, Issue 2, February 2009, Pages 139-147
Brain and Development

Original article
Event-related potentials of self-face recognition in children with pervasive developmental disorders

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.braindev.2008.04.011Get rights and content

Abstract

Patients with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) often have difficulty reading facial expressions and deciphering their implied meaning. We focused on semantic encoding related to face cognition to investigate event-related potentials (ERPs) to the subject’s own face and familiar faces in children with and without PDD. Eight children with PDD (seven boys and one girl; aged 10.8 ± 2.9 years; one left-handed) and nine age-matched typically developing children (four boys and five girls; aged 11.3 ± 2.3 years; one left-handed) participated in this study. The stimuli consisted of three face images (self, familiar, and unfamiliar faces), one scrambled face image, and one object image (e.g., cup) with gray scale. We confirmed three major components: N170 and early posterior negativity (EPN) in the occipito-temporal regions (T5 and T6) and P300 in the parietal region (Pz). An enhanced N170 was observed as a face-specific response in all subjects. However, semantic encoding of each face might be unrelated to N170 because the amplitude and latency were not significantly different among the face conditions. On the other hand, an additional component after N170, EPN which was calculated in each subtracted waveform (self vs. familiar and familiar vs. unfamiliar), indicated self-awareness and familiarity with respect to face cognition in the control adults and children. Furthermore, the P300 amplitude in the control adults was significantly greater in the self-face condition than in the familiar-face condition. However, no significant differences in the EPN and P300 components were observed among the self-, familiar-, and unfamiliar-face conditions in the PDD children. The results suggest a deficit of semantic encoding of faces in children with PDD, which may be implicated in their delay in social communication.

Introduction

Pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) are characterized by a unique behavior in communication. Persons with PDD often have difficulty reading facial expressions and deciphering their implied meaning. PDD may cause developmental deficits in theory of mind (ToM), mind-reading, and empathy underlying social interaction and communication skills [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. They are probably related to face cognition, because in many cases the face information can help us understand others’ feelings and recognize the communication situation.

Recently, noninvasive neuroimaging techniques have found dysfunctions in the brain domain related to perception of the face, eye gaze, and facial expression in persons with PDD [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]. Some studies showed that face-structural analysis contributed to fusiform gyrus. Other studies showed that eye gaze, emotion, and person identity corresponded to the inferior frontal cortex (IFC), amygdala, limbic system, and superior temporal sulcus (STS) [11], [12]. These areas are partly referred as mirror neuron system (MNS), which is associated with execution and observation of actions by oneself and/or others [13], [14]. In other words, the MNS affects social cognition significantly [15], [16]. Hence, we hypothesized that self-awareness and familiarity of a face also correspond to the MNS because both processes mutually affect social skills and communicative abilities. Indeed, the areas IFC and STS showed strong activity during self-face cognition [7], [17], [18], [19], [20]. Such a neurophysiological approach would help to define the etiology of autistic disorders (ADs) in PDD and to improve poor social skills; however, such studies are rare.

Many studies have evaluated the developmental stages of cognitive function following visual and auditory perception using event-related potentials (ERPs) [9], [21], [22], [23]. This technique is advantageous for clinical application, because ERP can be measured noninvasively and repeatedly, even in children. Analysis of the P300 component is especially effective for checking developmental stage and symptom severity because this component influences discrimination ability of stimulus features i.e., frequency, size, shape, and familiarity [21]. In the present study, we measured P300 followed by the face-specific response N170, and compared among the responses to one’s own face, a familiar face and an unfamiliar face. This may be the first study based on neurological evidence to explore person identity nodes in face cognition in AD.

Section snippets

Subjects

The PDD group consisted of eight children (seven boys and one girl) with Asperger’s syndrome (AS) or high function autism (HFA) aged 10.8 ± 2.9 years, one of whom was left-handed (FIQ: 97 ± 12; VIQ: 102 ± 15; PIQ: 92 ± 11). The subjects were recruited from National Center Hospital of Neurology and Psychiatry (Kodaira, Japan), and their diagnosis was based on DSM-IV criteria (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) by two pediatric neurology specialists [24]. The subjects’ intelligence quotients were

Results

We checked that the subjects could correctly discriminate the stimulus images of each condition prior to the recordings. All subjects successfully pressed a key in response to target stimuli, and the accuracy was 96.4% in the PDD group, 98.8% in the Children group, and 99.8% in the Adult group. The RT was longer (P < 0.05) in the PDD (508.5 ± 63.8 ms) and Children (483.0 ± 96.4 ms) groups than in the Adult group (409.7 ± 58.9 ms).

For all subjects, the N170 component was observed in the occipito-temporal

Discussion

Self-awareness is often interpreted by two concepts; one concept is a feedback system to one’s own action through somatosensory, visual, and auditory processes. To pinch something, we usually control our fingers through vision and somatosensory information, while motor planning encodes expected sensory traces for actions. We continuously monitor both the efference copy by planned movements and the proprioceptor/exteroceptor from real movements; thus, the relationship may create self-body image

Acknowledgement

This study was supported by a Health and Labor Sciences Research Grant (H16-Kokoro-001) for Research on Psychiatric and Neurological Diseases and Mental Health from the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare of Japan, JST “Brain science and Education” Type I, and a MEXT Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B) (700324).

References (55)

  • F. Zenker et al.

    Auditory P300 development from an active, passive and single-tone paradigms

    Int J Psychophysiol

    (1999)
  • J.P. Keenan et al.

    Self-recognition and the right prefrontal cortex

    Trends Cogn Sci

    (2000)
  • F. Irani et al.

    Self-face recognition and theory of mind in patients with schizophrenia and first-degree relatives

    Schizophr Res

    (2006)
  • J.V. Haxby et al.

    The distributed human neural system for face perception

    Trends Cogn Sci

    (2000)
  • S.R. Schweinberger et al.

    Human brain potential correlates of repetition priming in face and name recognition

    Neuropsychologia

    (2002)
  • M. Eimer et al.

    Event-related brain potential correlates of emotional face processing

    Neuropsychologia

    (2007)
  • P. Vuilleumier et al.

    Distributed and interactive brain mechanisms during emotion face perception: evidence from functional neuroimaging

    Neuropsychologia

    (2007)
  • M. Sugiura et al.

    Cortical mechanisms of person representation: recognition of famous and personally familiar names

    NeuroImage

    (2006)
  • Y. Zhu et al.

    Neural basis of cultural influence on self-representation

    NeuroImage

    (2007)
  • J. Geday et al.

    Stimulation of subthalamic nucleus inhibits emotional activation of fusiform gyrus

    NeuroImage

    (2006)
  • N. Hadjikhani et al.

    Seeing fearful body expressions activates the fusiform cortex and amygdala

    Curr Biol

    (2003)
  • S. Baron-Cohen

    Mindblindness: an essay on autism and theory of mind

    (1995)
  • S. Baron-Cohen et al.

    Autism: a window onto the development of the social and the analytic brain

    Annu Rev Neurosci

    (2005)
  • G. Dawson et al.

    Neural correlates of face and object recognition in young children with autism spectrum disorder, developmental delay, and typical development

    Child Dev

    (2002)
  • K. Pierce et al.

    The brain response to personally familiar faces in autism: findings of fusiform activity and beyond

    Brain

    (2004)
  • N. Hadjikhani et al.

    Abnormal activation of the social brain during face perception in autism

    Hum Brain Mapp

    (2007)
  • K. Nakamura et al.

    Activation of the right inferior frontal cortex during assessment of facial emotion

    J Neurophysiol

    (1999)
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text