Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl
the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects,
then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and
observations.
Today's article describes an advancement in how we understand facial recognition in people. According to the article, it's been assumed that the ability to recognize a familiar face was innate. Kids were born with it, and by association, autistic kids and people who have major issues with it just... weren't.
Apparently, at least one scientist didn't think so. So they tested that theory. Since it's highly unethical to do most kinds of human testing, especially if babies are involved, they went to the next best thing: monkeys. They raised two groups of monkeys, one group normally (the control group) and the other... well, abnormally (experiment group). Basically, they raised the second group of monkeys with only human handlers, and the human handlers wore welding masks the entire time. So, "faceless" parents. Nurturing parents, but that group of monkeys never saw a face until they had grown up quite a bit.
Then the brains of the monkeys were scanned using an fMRI. The part of the brain on the "experiment" monkeys that normally deals with facial recognition wasn't developed. And they didn't intuitively look at the faces of people and monkeys, when tested. They preferred to look at the hands of those pictures, and the corresponding recognition section of their brains was "overdeveloped." In short, the experimental monkeys had learned to differentiate individuals using hands instead of faces.
The researchers concluded this finding could be important for autism and developmental prosopagnosia (the complete inability to recognize faces, including one's own face). For autism, the researchers theorized that some of the social difficulties involved with autism might stem from lack of practice looking at faces, rather than necessarily some kind of innate disability.
I'm not going to disagree outright, because it's certainly going to make it more difficult to understand the nuances of a conversation if you're missing a basic component of that conversation. But of course it's not as simple as rounding autistic kids up and making them look at faces in conversations as a rule. There's a reason we sometimes avoid eye contact or looking at faces.
In my particular case? It hurts. I tend to avoid eye contact with random goers at the grocery store or the library. Not all the time, because people tend to think that's rude. But a lot of the time. I've explained why before, but essentially... it's like getting hit upside the head with a baseball bat. I don't know many people who would purposely sign up for getting hit in the head repeatedly, so perhaps it's no real surprise that I'm not overly interested in making casual eye contact.
So, if you mix that pain into the equation, you get a person that, as a rule, doesn't look at faces nearly as much as they could. If learning to recognize faces is a skill that requires lots of practice, I am very far behind in my practicing... which is perhaps why I am kind of abysmal at recognizing faces and putting names to them. Well, that and my shoddy visual processing. But that's probably an entirely different can of worms.
Today's article describes an advancement in how we understand facial recognition in people. According to the article, it's been assumed that the ability to recognize a familiar face was innate. Kids were born with it, and by association, autistic kids and people who have major issues with it just... weren't.
Apparently, at least one scientist didn't think so. So they tested that theory. Since it's highly unethical to do most kinds of human testing, especially if babies are involved, they went to the next best thing: monkeys. They raised two groups of monkeys, one group normally (the control group) and the other... well, abnormally (experiment group). Basically, they raised the second group of monkeys with only human handlers, and the human handlers wore welding masks the entire time. So, "faceless" parents. Nurturing parents, but that group of monkeys never saw a face until they had grown up quite a bit.
Then the brains of the monkeys were scanned using an fMRI. The part of the brain on the "experiment" monkeys that normally deals with facial recognition wasn't developed. And they didn't intuitively look at the faces of people and monkeys, when tested. They preferred to look at the hands of those pictures, and the corresponding recognition section of their brains was "overdeveloped." In short, the experimental monkeys had learned to differentiate individuals using hands instead of faces.
The researchers concluded this finding could be important for autism and developmental prosopagnosia (the complete inability to recognize faces, including one's own face). For autism, the researchers theorized that some of the social difficulties involved with autism might stem from lack of practice looking at faces, rather than necessarily some kind of innate disability.
I'm not going to disagree outright, because it's certainly going to make it more difficult to understand the nuances of a conversation if you're missing a basic component of that conversation. But of course it's not as simple as rounding autistic kids up and making them look at faces in conversations as a rule. There's a reason we sometimes avoid eye contact or looking at faces.
In my particular case? It hurts. I tend to avoid eye contact with random goers at the grocery store or the library. Not all the time, because people tend to think that's rude. But a lot of the time. I've explained why before, but essentially... it's like getting hit upside the head with a baseball bat. I don't know many people who would purposely sign up for getting hit in the head repeatedly, so perhaps it's no real surprise that I'm not overly interested in making casual eye contact.
So, if you mix that pain into the equation, you get a person that, as a rule, doesn't look at faces nearly as much as they could. If learning to recognize faces is a skill that requires lots of practice, I am very far behind in my practicing... which is perhaps why I am kind of abysmal at recognizing faces and putting names to them. Well, that and my shoddy visual processing. But that's probably an entirely different can of worms.
I am terrible with eye contact. This theory explains it for me too. I had very poor vision as a infant and young child, worse than now, so I didn't form the habit of looking at people in the eye (because my vision wasn't good enough to read their facial expression). My vision today is probably good enough to read some facial expressions but I'm not practiced at it so get me information on how people are feeling by their tone of voice and their body language.
ReplyDeleteAs of now since being unable to wear contacts in 2000 my eyes look weird (because they are dry and magnified) and that makes eye contact more difficult because my eyes often net an adverse reaction.