title: Both dog and human faces are explored abnormally by young children with autism spectrum disorders.
abstract: When looking at faces, typical individuals tend to have a right hemispheric bias manifested by a tendency to look first toward the left visual hemifield. Here, we tested for the presence of this bias in young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) for both human and dog faces. We show that children with ASD do not show a left visual hemifield (right hemispheric) bias for human faces. In addition, we show that this effect extends to faces of dogs, suggesting that the absence of bias is not specific to human faces, but applies to all faces with the first-order configuration, pointing to an anomaly at an early stage of visual analysis of faces. The lack of right hemispheric dominance for face processing may reflect a more general disorder of cerebral specialization of social functions in ASD.
authors.affiliation: aURI Octogone-CERPP, University of Toulouse, France bHarvard Medical School/MGH/MIT, Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Charlestown, Massachusetts, USA cGillberg Neuropsychiatry Center, Gothenburg University, Sweden.
authors.forename: Quentin
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Guillon
authors.forename: Nouchine
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Hadjikhani
authors.forename: Sophie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Baduel
authors.forename: Jeanne
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kruck
authors.forename: Mado
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Arnaud
authors.forename: Bernadette
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Rogé
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000818:Animals; D002659:Child Development Disorders, Pervasive / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004285:Dogs; D053483:Eye Movement Measurements; D005133:Eye Movements; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011581:Psychological Tests; D014794:Visual Fields; D014796:Visual Perception