A cross-syndrome study of the development of holistic face recognition in children with autism, Down syndrome, and Williams syndrome

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Abstract

We report a cross-syndrome comparison of the development of holistic processing in face recognition in school-aged children with developmental disorders: autism, Down syndrome, and Williams syndrome. The autism group was split into two groups: one with high-functioning children and one with low-functioning children. The latter group has rarely been studied in this context. The four disorder groups were compared with typically developing children. Cross-sectional trajectory analyses were used to compare development in a modified version of Tanaka and Farah’s part–whole task. Trajectories were constructed linking part–whole performance either to chronological age or to several measures of mental age (receptive vocabulary, visuospatial construction, and the Benton Facial Recognition Test). In addition to variable delays in onset and rate of development, we found an atypical profile in all disorder groups. These profiles were atypical in different ways, indicating multiple pathways to, and variable outcomes in, the development of face recognition. We discuss the implications for theories of face recognition in both atypical and typical development, including the idea that part–whole and rotation manipulations may tap different aspects of holistic and/or configural processing.

Introduction

Faces have a special status as visual stimuli in terms of both their social relevance and the expertise that adults demonstrate in their recognition. Although infants show an early preference for faces (e.g., Johnson, Dziurawiec, Ellis, & Morton, 1991), investigation of the subsequent developmental course of face recognition has revealed different underlying processes and strategies that improve at different rates (e.g., Carey and Diamond, 1977, Freire and Lee, 2001, Maurer et al., 2002). In this article, we focus on one of these processes, holistic recognition, and examine its developmental profile in typically developing (TD) children and children with developmental disorders: autism, Down syndrome (DS), and Williams syndrome (WS).

Behavioral and neuroimaging experimentation has used several paradigms to investigate how individuals use visual information to recognize faces. These include (sometimes in combination) the manipulation of facial features such as eyes, mouth, nose, and facial outline; the presentation of these features in or out of the context of the face; the presentation of parts of faces such as the top or bottom half; and manipulation of the orientation at which the face is presented, for example, comparing upright and inverted presentations. Based on these paradigms, several processes have been identified and are broadly described as follows: (a) holistic processing, occasionally referred to as “global” or gestalt processing, where the face is recognized as a whole (holistic processing is sometimes conceived of in terms of a fast template-matching procedure [see Diamond & Carey, 1986, for norm-based accounts; see Tanaka & Farah, 1993, and Tanaka & Sengco, 1997, for discussions of accounts based on the accessibility of different types of facial information]); (b) featural processing, also known as local or analytical face processing, where recognition is driven by individual features such as eyes, nose, and mouth; and (c) configural processing, where recognition is driven by the arrangement of the features in the face. This may be in terms of the relative positioning of the features, termed first-order configural information (e.g., eyes above nose), or in terms of the exact distances between features, termed second-order configural or relational information (e.g., eye separation). The contribution of these three processes to face recognition changes gradually with chronological age (CA), with configural processing being the last to emerge (Maurer et al., 2002, Mondloch et al., 2002).

In the following sections, we briefly review the research on holistic face recognition and its development and then consider the contrasting face recognition skills reported in the three developmental disorders.

Section snippets

Holistic face recognition

The role of parts and wholes in perception has long been a focus of research. The face is perhaps a unique example of a stimulus that is seen as an organized meaningful pattern that is difficult to break down into its parts without harming perception. Compelling examples of holistic processing come from two behavioral paradigms widely used to evaluate the existence of holistic face processing: the part–whole paradigm (Tanaka & Farah, 1993) and the composite face effect (Young, Hellawell, & Hay,

Participants

Participants were 33 children with autism (28 boys and 5 girls, mean age = 8 years 6 months), 15 children with DS (10 boys and 5 girls, mean age = 9 years 6 months), 15 children with WS (7 boys and 8 girls, mean age = 8 years 9 months), and 25 TD children (13 boys and 12 girls, mean age = 7 years 2 months). See Table 1 for group details. The greater age range of the TD sample permitted comparisons to be made between disorder and TD trajectories on the basis of either CA or MA where disorder groups may

Results

The results are provided in three sections. First, we assess how well the children in each group recognized faces. Second, we explore the development of part–whole processing and its sensitivity to inversion using trajectory analysis. Third, we explore any differential effects of the target feature (eyes, nose, or mouth) on responses for the groups.

Discussion

In comparison with previous use of the part–whole task, the most notable finding for our typically developing children was a reverse pattern of difficulty compared with Tanaka and Farah’s (1993) findings. In our version of the task, matching of face feature to target was easier in the part condition than in the whole condition, whereas Farah and Tanaka found that recall was easier in the whole condition than in the part condition. In our results, a consistent pattern of RT data indicated that

Uncited references

Chung and Thomson, 1995, Davies et al., 1994.

Acknowledgments

We thank the Williams Syndrome Foundation (UK) and Resources for Autism (London) for putting us in touch with families. We are grateful to all children and teachers from the Livingstone School and the Manor School in North London for their continuing collaboration. This research was supported by a Birkbeck College, University of London, studentship to the first author, and M.S.T’s contribution was supported by MRC Career Establishment Grant G0300188.

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