Abstract
<p>It seems well-established that many autistic individuals experience face recognition difficulties. It is also commonly assumed that many autistic individuals exhibit a local bias in visual processing in that they weigh details more than the overall pattern that the details are part of. Given that face recognition seems to depend critically on holistic compared with parts-based processing, this has led to the suggestion that reduced face recognition ability may be a consequence of the altered perceptual processing style in autism. The evidence supporting a direct link is sparse, however, as face recognition and global-local processing are seldomly studied in the same samples. In the present study we thus examined this potential link in a sample of 41 autistic individuals who performed two face recognition experiments as well as Navon’s paradigm which makes it possible to examine different global-local biases directly. In keeping with previous studies, we find that the autistic individuals performed less efficiently than a group of matched non-autistic individuals and that 20% performed at a level comparable with what is seen in developmental prosopagnosia. However, there was no support for group differences in global-local processing with the data being between 3 to 11 times more likely under the hypothesis of no difference between the groups. This suggests that the face recognition difficulties seen in the present sample of autistic individuals are unlikely to reflect a local bias in visual processing.</p>