Loading...
The clinical observation that people with autism avoid eye gaze has spurred research interest, and recent studies have shown that autistic individuals looking at faces spend less time fixating on eyes and have lower fusiform gyrus activation than do typically developing individuals (see Journal Watch Psychiatry Nov 6 2002 and Journal Watch Psychiatry Jun 1 2000). These researchers used functional MRI (fMRI) to examine activation of the amygdala and fusiform gyrus during emotion discrimination and facial recognition.
In the emotion-discrimination task, involving 11 participants with autism and 12 typically developing individuals (“controls”; mean ages 16 and 17, respectively), autism participants took longer than controls to identify the emot…