Teaching Children with Autism to Recognize Faces

For humans, the face contains a wealth of social information regarding the age, gender, race, emotional state, and identity of a person. Given their immense social importance, it is not so surprising that newborns only 30 min old show a preference for faces over other non-face objects (Morton and Johnson 1991). However, solely attending to faces in the environment is not enough. In everyday life, it is essential that we identify faces at the level of the individual; that is, we should recognize that it is John’s face, rather than simply a man’s face or a human face. The individual level of recognition is especially important in social contexts. For example, imagine you are having dinner in a restaurant and someone comes over and says hello to you. You find the face to be highly familiar, but you can’t recall who that person is. Hundreds of possibilities come to your mind during the awkward handshake; “Could it be James, or Mike, or....” Failure to recognize faces often ends up in embarrassment. Fortunately, this kind of situation does not happen very often. Most people have the expertise to process faces automatically, and can easily recognize the identity of a given face from thousands of other faces. Although the deficit in face identity recognition is not a defining characteristic of the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis (APA 2000), a large body of evidence has demonstrated that individuals with ASD are selectively impaired in their face processing abilities (e.g., Serra et al. 2003; Scherf et al. 2008; Wolf et al. 2008; Wilson et al. 2010a, b; Tanaka et al. 2010; McPartland et al. 2011; Tanaka et al. 2012). On one hand, it is conceivable that the face processing difficulties experienced by people with ASD play a contributing role to the core social and communication deficits that characterize the autism condition (Dawson et al. 2005; Schultz 2005). However, the reverse relationship is also plausible. Poor social and