Local Features in Angry Faces Capture Attention in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders Exhibiting Local-Biased Perceptual Characteristics

Angry faces capture humans' attention more rapidly than emotionally positive facial expressions—a phenomenon known as the Anger Superiority Effect (ASE). Past studies have reported that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) show ASE, but that apparently atypical mechanisms seemed to underlie. In the present study, we assumed that for ASDs who tend to process faces in a feature-based manner, single facial features would activate systems implicated in facilitated processing for angry faces. To test this assumption, we examined ASE in children with and without ASD by a visual search paradigm using schematic drawings of whole face, eyebrows-only, or mouth-only as stimuli. Results revealed that only ASD children showed rapid detection of anger over happiness (i.e., ASE) for the mouth-only condition, whereas both groups showed clear ASE for the whole face and eyebrows-only conditions. Furthermore, individuals with ASD who showed more local-based perceptual characteristics, assessed by a Navon task, also showed stronger ASE for the mouth-only condition. These findings suggest that extracting facial features and perceiving emotions are fundamental to ASE in ASD.