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A Lack of Left Visual Field Bias When Individuals with Autism Process Faces

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Abstract

It has been established that typically developing individuals have a bias to attend to facial information in the left visual field (LVF) more than in the right visual field. This bias is thought to arise from the right hemisphere’s advantage for processing facial information, with evidence suggesting it to be driven by the configural demands of face processing. Considering research showing that individuals with autism have impaired face processing abilities, with marked deficits in configural processing, it was hypothesized that they would not demonstrate a LVF bias for faces. Eye-tracking technology was used to show that individuals with autism were not spontaneously biased to facial information in the LVF, in contrast to a control group, while discriminating facial gender.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by grant from the National Institutes of Health. The authors would like to thank Dr. Charles Nelson, Dr. Giulia Righi and Dr. Marlene Behrmann for their helpful comments and discussion of the project. We also thank Kao-Wei Chua for his help in formatting the paper, and Dr. Holly Gastgeb, Dr. Keiran Rump, Desiree Wilkinson, Sarah Hannigen, Sara Green and Kao-Wei Chua for testing participants.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Eva M. Dundas, Catherine A. Best & Mark S. Strauss

  2. University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Nancy J. Minshew

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  1. Eva M. Dundas
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  2. Catherine A. Best
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  3. Nancy J. Minshew
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  4. Mark S. Strauss
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Correspondence to Mark S. Strauss.

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Dundas, E.M., Best, C.A., Minshew, N.J. et al. A Lack of Left Visual Field Bias When Individuals with Autism Process Faces. J Autism Dev Disord 42, 1104–1111 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-011-1354-2

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