Abstract
Background
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit frequent behavioral deficits
in facial emotion recognition (FER). It remains unknown whether these deficits arise
because facial emotion information is not encoded in their neural signal or because
it is encodes but fails to translate to FER behavior (deployment). This distinction
has functional implications, including constraining when differences in social information
processing occur in ASD, and guiding interventions (i.e., developing prosthetic FER
vs. reinforcing existing skills).
Methods
We utilized a discriminative and contemporary machine learning approach—deep convolutional
neural networks—to classify facial emotions viewed by individuals with and without
ASD (N = 88) from concurrently recorded electroencephalography signals.
Results
The convolutional neural network classified facial emotions with high accuracy for
both ASD and non-ASD groups, even though individuals with ASD performed more poorly
on the concurrent FER task. In fact, convolutional neural network accuracy was greater
in the ASD group and was not related to behavioral performance. This pattern of results
replicated across three independent participant samples. Moreover, feature importance
analyses suggested that a late temporal window of neural activity (1000–1500 ms) may
be uniquely important in facial emotion classification for individuals with ASD.
Conclusions
Our results reveal for the first time that facial emotion information is encoded in
the neural signal of individuals with (and without) ASD. Thus, observed difficulties
in behavioral FER associated with ASD likely arise from difficulties in decoding or
deployment of facial emotion information within the neural signal. Interventions should
focus on capitalizing on this intact encoding rather than promoting compensation or
FER prostheses.
Keywords
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Article Info
Publication History
Published online: April 12, 2021
Accepted:
March 31,
2021
Received in revised form:
March 31,
2021
Received:
March 3,
2021
Identification
Copyright
Published by Elsevier Inc on behalf of Society of Biological Psychiatry.
