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Reprint of “Ensemble perception of emotions in autistic and typical children and adolescents”

Karaminis, T. ORCID: 0000-0003-2977-5451, Neil, L., Manning, C. , Turi, M., Fiorentini, C., Burr, D. & Pellicano, E. (2018). Reprint of “Ensemble perception of emotions in autistic and typical children and adolescents”. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 29, pp. 97-107. doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2018.02.003

Abstract

Ensemble perception, the ability to assess automatically the summary of large amounts of information presented in visual scenes, is available early in typical development. This ability might be compromised in autistic children, who are thought to present limitations in maintaining summary statistics representations for the recent history of sensory input. Here we examined ensemble perception of facial emotional expressions in 35 autistic children, 30 age- and ability-matched typical children and 25 typical adults. Participants received three tasks: a) an ‘ensemble’ emotion discrimination task; b) a baseline (single-face) emotion discrimination task; and c) a facial expression identification task. Children performed worse than adults on all three tasks. Unexpectedly, autistic and typical children were, on average, indistinguishable in their precision and accuracy on all three tasks. Computational modelling suggested that, on average, autistic and typical children used ensemble-encoding strategies to a similar extent; but ensemble perception was related to non-verbal reasoning abilities in autistic but not in typical children. Eye-movement data also showed no group differences in the way children attended to the stimuli. Our combined findings suggest that the abilities of autistic and typical children for ensemble perception of emotions are comparable on average.

Publication Type: Article
Additional Information: © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
Publisher Keywords: Ensemble perception, Autism, Summary statistics, Facial expressions, Emotions
Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
R Medicine > RJ Pediatrics > RJ101 Child Health. Child health services
Departments: School of Health & Psychological Sciences
School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Psychology
SWORD Depositor:
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