title: Priming Facial Gender and Emotional Valence: The Influence of Spatial Frequency on Face Perception in ASD.
abstract: Adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) performed two priming experiments in which they implicitly processed a prime stimulus, containing high and/or low spatial frequency information, and then explicitly categorized a target face either as male/female (gender task) or as positive/negative (Valence task). Adolescents with ASD made more categorization errors than typically developing adolescents. They also showed an age-dependent improvement in categorization speed and had more difficulties with categorizing facial expressions than gender. However, in neither of the categorization tasks, we found group differences in the processing of coarse versus fine prime information. This contradicted our expectations, and indicated that the perceptual differences between adolescents with and without ASD critically depended on the processing time available for the primes.
authors.affiliation: Brain and Cognition, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. steven.vanmarcke@kuleuven.be.|Leuven Autism Research (LAuRes), KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. steven.vanmarcke@kuleuven.be.|Brain and Cognition, Department of Brain & Cognition, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), 3000, Leuven, Belgium. steven.vanmarcke@kuleuven.be.
authors.forename: Steven
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-2181-7565
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Vanmarcke
authors.affiliation: Brain and Cognition, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.|Leuven Autism Research (LAuRes), KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Johan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wagemans
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000067877:Autism Spectrum Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D000066499:Facial Recognition; D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D060865:Repetition Priming; D013037:Spatial Behavior
keywords: Autism spectrum disorder; Face perception; Spatial frequency; Vision research