Keep Your Eyes on the Eyes and the Mouth

Difficulty reading and interpreting facial expressions is often said to be a feature of autism according to the DSM-IV; software, various online games, and other products have and are being developed to teach autistic children how to “read” faces. As noted in today’s Phys.org, a study by University of Nottingham researchers rather suggests that autistic children are able to interpret “mentalistic” states when facial expressions are animated (previous studies have used static photographs). Further, autistic children seem to be particularly reliant on the eyes and mouth when making such interpretations:

Researchers edited images so that different parts of the face (eyes and mouth) remained static and neutral. This technique, known as “freezing,” created seamless facial images that allowed the researchers to explore the importance of certain regions of the face in identifying mental states.

In one experiment, 18 autistic children ages 10 to 14 were able to attribute a range of mental states to dynamic and static facial expressions, but they did not perform as well as non-autistic children. The autistic children were better at recognizing mental states when the eyes and mouth conveyed information than when these facial features were static and neutral.

In a second experiment, 18 autistic children ages 11 to 15 were as successful as non-autistic children in interpreting mental states, whether they saw the eyes in isolation or in the context of the whole face. This indicates that autistic children do, in fact, make use of information from the eyes, a finding that contradicts prior studies.

Elisa Back, the study’s lead author and a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, notes that “’sophisticated digital imaging techniques with animated facial expressions’” were used instead of static photographs. The study is to be published in the March-April 2007 issue of the journal Child Development.

I have long felt that Charlie can sense emotions (mine for sure) via many non-verbal cues, from the tone of my voice to the way I hold my body. Charlie learned to pronounce a number of sounds through verbal imitation in which he had to look closely at ours and the therapists’ mouths to figure out how to shape his (until he was about 5 years old, he was not able to do this); this study makes me curious to see if he is indeed looking at my eyes and mouth more.