The ability to recognize an individual face is essential to human social interaction. Even subtle errors in this process can have huge implications for the way we relate to social partners. Because autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by deficits in social interaction, researchers have theorized about the potential role of atypical face identity processing to the symptom profile of ASD for more than 40 years. We conducted an empirical meta-analysis of this large literature to determine whether and to what extent face identity processing is atypical in ASD compared to typically developing (TD) individuals. We also tested the hypotheses that the deficit is selective to face identity recognition, not perception, and that methodological variation across studies moderates the magnitude of the estimated deficit. We identified 112 studies (5,390 participants) that generated 172 effect sizes from both recognition (k = 119) and discrimination (k = 53) paradigms. We used state-of-the-art approaches for assessing the validity and robustness of the analyses. We found comparable and large deficits in ASD for both face identity recognition (Hedge's g = -0.86) and discrimination (Hedge's g = -0.82). This means that the score of an average ASD individual is nearly 1 SD below the average TD individual on tasks assessing both aspects of face identity processing. These deficits generalize across age groups, sex, IQ scores, and task paradigms. These findings suggest that deficits in face identity processing may represent a core deficit in ASD. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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自闭症面部识别缺陷的定量荟萃分析：40 年的研究。

识别个人面孔的能力对于人类社交互动至关重要。在这个过程中，即使是细微的错误也会对我们与社会伙伴的关系产生巨大影响。由于自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD) 的特征是社交互动不足，因此 40 多年来，研究人员一直在理论化非典型面部识别处理对 ASD 症状特征的潜在作用。我们对这一大型文献进行了实证荟萃分析，以确定与典型发育 (TD) 个体相比，面部身份处理在 ASD 中是否以及在多大程度上是非典型的。我们还测试了以下假设，即缺陷对面部身份识别而不是感知具有选择性，并且研究之间的方法学差异缓和了估计缺陷的幅度。我们确定了 112 项研究（5，390 名参与者）从识别（k = 119）和歧视（k = 53）范式中产生了 172 个效应大小。我们使用最先进的方法来评估分析的有效性和稳健性。我们发现 ASD 在面部身份识别 (Hedge's g = -0.86) 和歧视 (Hedge's g = -0.82) 方面存在相当大的缺陷。这意味着在评估面部身份处理的两个方面的任务中，平均 ASD 个体的分数比平均 TD 个体低近 1 SD。这些缺陷普遍存在于年龄组、性别、智商分数和任务范式中。这些发现表明，面部识别处理的缺陷可能代表 ASD 的核心缺陷。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2021 APA，保留所有权利）。