The earlier fMRI face studies (most famously, Schultz et al., 2000) had important methodological issues. I owe my involvement in autism research at least in part to successfully predicting that controlling for attention in autistics in fMRI face studies would produce typical FG activation.

For a comprehensive (rather than selective) look at the autism face studies (behavioural, neurophysiological, and functional imaging studies), see Jemel et al. (2006).

Most of what is popularly said to be “known” about how autistics look at and process face images is based on cliché rather than on the published data.

The real problem is when some non-autistics deny the personhood and/or humanity of autistics. That is, non-autistics look at autistics and fail to detect that there is a person there, or anything human. This common phenomenon can be seen, among many other places, in the writing of a lot of famous scientists, including Thomas Insel, Ivar Lovaas, Michael Tomasello, Steven Pinker, V.S. Ramachandran, etc. (sorry, again, no time to go fetch all the sources, but they’re out there…).

My question from reading this is: What might be this “other route” by which it is suggested autistic people are “still getting” to personhood—–what are “other routes” to ethical behavior? And do those statements I just typed open up some misleading questions about autistic persons and ethics?

I don’t think I was being very precise in what I meant in that post, so let me clarify.

We know from imaging experiments that some individuals with autism do not activation in the area of the brain associated with faces. This part of the brain is called the fusiform face gyrus. We know that faces — as a special class of objects — are represented different in the human brain than other things.

This observation in individuals with autism led some researchers to speculate that it might explain some of the social difficulties that they have. If you have trouble recognizing faces as a special class of objects — that faces are fundamentally special — it is very difficult to interact with others in the way that they expect.

Now the article I cited was arguing that the system of recognizing personhood — of which the fusiform face gyrus is a part — is critical to ethical behavior. In essence they are saying that representing persons as special in the brain and being ethical towards them are inextricably linked.

But that argument does not quite work for me. I know people with autism. I have never found them to be more or less ethical than everyone else, and if the argument presented in the article is correct we wouldn’t expect that to be the case.

The point of my comment was to highlight a consequence of their argument. If we assume that ethical behavior is contingent on some brain system and autistic people show deficits in this system, then autistic people cannot be ethical in the same way as other people are.

As I think you and I would agree that this statement is patently false, then the argument in the article must be somehow fundamentally flawed.

I’m sorry I was so roundabout in my post, but I hope this clarifies where I was going with that.