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Priming Facial Gender and Emotional Valence: The Influence of Spatial Frequency on Face Perception in ASD

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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.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO) to Steven Vanmarcke and long-term structural funding by the Flemish Government (METH/14/02) to Johan Wagemans. We would like to thank Jean Steyaert, Ilse Noens and all the collaborators of the Leuven Autism Research (LAuRes) team for the assistance in the recruitment of the participants and for discussions, and of course all participants for their time and contribution to this research.

Author Contributions

SV conceived of the study, participated in its design, coordination, measurement and analysis. He also drafted the manuscript; JW participated in the design, analysis and interpretation of the data. Both authors read, commented and approved the final manuscript.

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO) and long-term structural funding by the Flemish Government (METH/14/02).

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  1. Brain and Cognition, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Steven Vanmarcke & Johan Wagemans

  2. Leuven Autism Research (LAuRes), KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Steven Vanmarcke & Johan Wagemans

  3. Brain and Cognition, Department of Brain & Cognition, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Steven Vanmarcke

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Vanmarcke, S., Wagemans, J. Priming Facial Gender and Emotional Valence: The Influence of Spatial Frequency on Face Perception in ASD. J Autism Dev Disord 47, 927–946 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-016-3017-9

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