Social cognition
Measuring intuitive and deliberate emotion recognition in autism
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Adults with autism show a larger performance deficit when reading facial emotions intuitively without verbal labels than when deliberately matching faces to words, and unlike neurotypical adults, their intuitive and deliberate performance is highly correlated.
Key findings
Both groups scored well above the 25% chance level, but the neurotypical group outperformed the autism group on both tasks. While neurotypical participants performed significantly better on the explicit task compared to the implicit task, the autism group showed no such performance gap. Furthermore, a composite score combining accuracy and reaction time revealed a greater difference between the groups on the implicit task than the explicit task, suggesting a more pronounced deficit in intuitive emotion processing in autism.
Methodology
The researchers developed the 'Face Puzzle' paradigm to compare explicit and implicit emotion recognition in 24 neurotypical adults and 24 adults on the autism spectrum. Both groups completed separate tasks containing 25 trials each, using videos portrayed by 15 professional actors. In the explicit task, participants matched full face videos to verbal emotion labels. In the implicit task, they paired an eye video with a mouth video chosen from four options without any verbal labels.
Limitations
To begin with, the implicit task may actually be more difficult than the explicit task, meaning the observed patterns could stem from general task difficulty rather than distinct cognitive systems. Additionally, because participants were adults and the study used a cross-sectional design, it cannot prove that implicit deficits cause explicit deficits during development. Finally, the study did not control for other non-social factors that could affect performance, such as holistic visual processing or motion perception.
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