A common example of social differences in autism spectrum disorder is poor modulation of reciprocal gaze, including reduced duration of eye contact and difficulty detecting the aim of another's gaze. It remains unclear, however, whether such differences are specific to the social domain, or are instead indicative of broader alterations in…

Individuals with autism spectrum conditions attend less to the left side of centrally presented face stimuli compared to neurotypical individuals, suggesting a reduction in right hemisphere activation. We examined whether a similar bias exists for non-facial stimuli in a large sample of neurotypical adults rated above- or below-average on the…

Sensitive responding to others' emotional body expressions is an essential social skill in humans. Using event-related brain potentials, it has recently been shown that the ability to discriminate between emotional body expressions develops between 4 and 8 months of age. However, it is not clear whether the perception of emotional body expressions…

Background: Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) involve a core deficit in social functioning and impairments in the ability to recognize face emotions. In an emotional faces task designed to constrain group differences in attention, the present study used functional MRI to characterize activation in the amygdala, ventral prefrontal cortex (vPFC), and…

Neurophysiological evidence is described showing that some neurons in the macaque inferior temporal visual cortex have responses that are invariant with respect to the position, size and view of faces and objects, and that these neurons show rapid processing and rapid learning. Which face or object is present is encoded using a distributed…