Abstract
Abstract
Background
Face individual identity recognition skill is heritable and independent of intellectual ability. Difficulties in face individual identity recognition are present in autistic individuals and their family members and are possibly linked to oxytocin polymorphisms in families with an autistic child. While it is reported that developmental prosopagnosia (i.e., impaired face identity recognition) occurs in 2–3% of the general population, no prosopagnosia prevalence estimate is available for autism. Furthermore, an autism within-group approach has not been reported towards characterizing impaired face memory and to investigate its possible links to social and communication difficulties.
Methods
The present study estimated the prevalence of prosopagnosia in 80 autistic adults with no intellectual disability, investigated its cognitive characteristics and links to autism symptoms’ severity, personality traits, and mental state understanding from the eye region by using standardized tests and questionnaires.
Results
More than one third of autistic participants showed prosopagnosia. Their face memory skill was not associated with their symptom’s severity, empathy, alexithymia, or general intelligence. Face identity recognition was instead linked to mental state recognition from the eye region only in autistic individuals who had prosopagnosia, and this relationship did not depend on participants’ basic face perception skills. Importantly, we found that autistic participants were not aware of their face memory skills.
Limitations
We did not test an epidemiological sample, and additional work is necessary to establish whether these results generalize to the entire autism spectrum.
Conclusions
Impaired face individual identity recognition meets the criteria to be a potential endophenotype in autism. In the future, testing for face memory could be used to stratify autistic individuals into genetically meaningful subgroups and be translatable to autism animal models.
Funder
National Institutes of Health
Ministero della Salute
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Harvard Catalyst
Innovative Medicines Initiative
Medical Research Council
Wellcome Trust
Autism Research Trust
NIHR Biomedical Research Centre
National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care East of England at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust
Sidney R. Baer, Jr. Foundation
National Science Foundation
The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center
US-IT Fulbright Commission
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
Psychiatry and Mental health,Developmental Biology,Developmental Neuroscience,Molecular Biology
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