Difficulty in Recognizing Faces in Autism Linked to Performance in a Group of Neurons

Difficulty in Recognizing Faces in Autism Linked to Performance in a Group of Neurons

Mar. 18, 2013 — Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) have discovered a brain anomaly that explains why some people diagnosed with autism cannot easily recognize faces -- a deficit linked to the impairments in social interactions considered to be the hallmark of the disorder.They also say that the novel neuroimaging analysis technique they developed to arrive at this finding is likely to help link behavioral deficits to differences at the neural level in a range of neurological disorders.
Neuroscientists have used traditional fMRI studies in the past to probe the neural bases of behavioral differences in people with autism, but these studies have produced conflicting results... . the scientists say that in the brains of many individuals with autism, neurons in the brain area that processes faces (the fusiform face area, or FFA) are too broadly "tuned" to finely discriminate between facial features of different people. They made this discovery using a form of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that scans output from the blueberry-sized FFA, located behind the right ear...after the study was completed, the researchers successfully attempted to improve facial recognition skills in an autistic participant. They showed the participant pairs of faces that were very dissimilar at first, but became increasingly similar, and found that FFA tuning improved along with behavioral ability to tell the faces apart. "This suggests high-level brain areas may still be somewhat plastic in adulthood," says Riesenhuber.

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