Neurological

Detection of facial emotions in Autism Spectrum Disorders that are not tied to neural coding

Facial Emotion Detection (FER) problems are common in people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This deficit is not related to how information is encoded in the neural signal, but rather to how it is decoded. This is evident from a recent study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

The researchers studied 40 adolescents with ASD and 48 without. Participants completed the diagnostic analysis of nonverbal behavior for FER during an EEG test. The researchers used a deep learning technique called a CNN (Deep Convolutional Neural Network) classifier to analyze the data.

CNN has successfully predicted facial emotions (e.g., happy, sad) seen on each test. The researchers found no association between autism and CNN classification accuracy. There was no relationship between CNN accuracy and behavioral performance, although behavior was stronger in the ASD group.

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The analysis shows that facial emotion information is encoded in people with and without ASD and can be extracted from them. Related impairments are likely to occur during coding.

One of the restrictions is that the ASD group only included verbally competent people.

Deficits in the FER are likely due to “aberrations later in the processing stream such as the use or provision of information about facial emotions,” the researchers concluded.

“The results reported here suggest that future studies should focus on identifying where and when the breakdown of the translation from neural coding to behavioral response might be, which will be critical to further informing about intervention evolution.”

reference

Mayor Torres JM, Clarkson T, Hauschild KM, Luhmann CC, Dr. Lerner, Riccardi G, facial emotions are precisely coded in the neural signal of people with autism spectrum disorder: a deep learning approach. Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging. Published online April 16, 2021. doi: 10.1016 / j.bpsc.2021.03.015

This article originally appeared on Psychiatry Advisor

Subjects:

Autism Spectrum Disorder General Psychiatry Pediatrics

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