Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by difficulties in social communication and interaction, as well as restricted and repetitive behaviour and thoughts. In addition, challenges in face perception are commonly observed in ASD, but the origin of such challenges remains under debate. Recently, Kamensek et al., (2021) revealed that daily visual exposure to faces (the face-diet) for adults with ASD is reduced and atypical, suggesting an experiential contribution to face recognition challenges in this population. Specifically, the face-diet of those with ASD is biased towards faces in profile pose, regardless of familiarity, compared to neuro-typical adults. We examined whether an exposure pattern favouring profile pose may lead to enhanced encoding and recognition of this stimulus type. We tested adults with and without ASD in a 3-alternative forced-choice face recognition paradigm at two poses: frontal and profile. Preliminary results for 13 adults with ASD and 5 non-autistic controls reveals a main effect of group (p = .006), with greater accuracy for the controls (M=90.56%) than the ASD group (M=76%); a main effect of pose (p < .001) with better accuracy for frontal pose (M=87.96%) than profile (M=72.12%), but no interaction (p = .144). These results indicate better overall face recognition in the non-autistic control group, and contrary to our hypothesis, no profile pose advantage for the ASD group. Despite proportionally greater exposure to profile faces, overall limited exposure duration to faces in autistic individuals may preclude accumulation of experience necessary to yield an advantage in this pose. Furthermore, re-examination of the face-diet data revealed that profile faces were predominantly seen at far distances, potentially limiting development of expertise at this pose. Finally, the profile pose is uncommon in social interaction (Oruc et al., 2019) and may signal a lack of engagement, further impeding involvement of expert face processes