Abnormal processing of social information from faces in autism
Abnormal processing of social information from faces in autism
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DOI：
10.1162/089892901564289
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发表时间：
2001-03-01
影响因子：
3.2
通讯作者：
Piven, J
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Adolphs, R;Sears, L;Piven, J
自闭症在一定程度上被认为具有情感和社会认知功能障碍的特征，但其潜在过程的病理机制以及相关的神经基础仍未被充分了解。一些研究假设杏仁核功能异常可能是自闭症中某些障碍的原因，特别是对面部社会相关信息的识别受损。我们在四个实验中对8名高功能自闭症患者进行了研究，这些实验主要评估了对情感和社会信息（主要来自面部）的识别。所使用的所有任务都与之前在双侧杏仁核损伤患者研究中使用的任务相同，以便进行直接比较。所有自闭症患者对面部可信度都做出了异常的社会判断；然而，他们都能够根据词汇刺激做出正常的社会判断，并且都具有正常的感知辨别刺激的能力。总体而言，来自自闭症患者的数据与来自有局部杏仁核损伤的神经疾病患者的数据有一些相似之处。我们认为，自闭症患者的杏仁核功能障碍可能导致将社会相关刺激的视觉感知与社会知识的提取以及社会行为的引发相联系的能力受损。
Autism has been thought to be characterized, in part, by dysfunction in emotional and social cognition, but the pathology of the underlying processes and their neural substrates remain poorly understood. Several studies have hypothesized that abnormal amygdala function may account for some of the impairments seen in autism, specifically, impaired recognition of socially relevant information from faces. We explored this issue in eight high-functioning subjects with autism in four experiments that assessed recognition of emotional and social information, primarily from faces. All tasks used were identical to those previously used in studies of subjects with bilateral amygdala damage, permitting direct comparisons. All subjects with autism made abnormal social judgments regarding the trustworthiness of faces; however, all were able to make normal social judgments from lexical stimuli, and all had a normal ability to perceptually discriminate the stimuli. Overall, these data from subjects with autism show some parallels to those from neurological subjects with focal amygdala damage. We suggest that amygdala dysfunction in autism might contribute to an impaired ability to link visual perception of socially relevant stimuli with retrieval of social knowledge and with elicitation of social behavior.