Ileanna Zaballa

Examining Facial Mimicry and Early Engagement with Faces in the Development of Face
Processing in Infants at high-risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder

Introduction

The capacity to recognize and process information from the faces of the people around
us is central for functioning in our highly social world. Facial perception and ensuing recognition
is a highly developed visual perceptual skill that is dependent on specialized neural circuitry.
There is a large body of research that supports that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder
(ASD) have difficulties with processing faces. Faces play a vital role in conveying social and
emotional information, so these face-processing difficulties may be central to the core deficits in
ASD. Autism Spectrum Disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in
social interaction, communication, and the presence of restricted interests and stereotyped
behaviors (DSM-5).
Current research in the field suggests that longer looking at faces in infants at risk for
ASD might reflect early face-processing difficulties and predicts difficulties with recognizing
faces later in life (Klerk 2014). In a recent study high risk infants spent proportionally more time
looking at faces relative to other objects than the low-risk control. It was suspected that these
infants would subsequently have better performance on face recognition tasks at 3 years, but
the opposite proved to be true. This supports a hypothesis that in the high-risk group higher
face engagement at 7 months instead reflects face-processing difficulties and would therefore
be associated with poorer performance on the face recognition task at 3 years.
Particularly when participants with ASD and controls view faces during facial recognition
tasks, both groups spend more time fixating on the eyes or eye regions compared to other

regions of the face. The eyes, in combination with the nose and mouth regions, form the core
components of the face information triangle and receive the most attention during face
perception. Relative to controls, individuals with ASD have been shown to spend less time
fixating on the eyes and other core components of the face information triangle (Albrecht).
The phenomenon of automatic mimicry or how merely observing another persons
behavior can elicit a corresponding behavior in the observer has fascinated researchers.
Fundamental mimicry, such as tongue protrusion or mouth opening, can be observed in
newborns (Meltzoff & Moore, 1989). This suggests that from birth, infants possess rudimentary
facial processing capacities. Infants as young as two days of age are capable of mimicking the
facial expressions of an adult, which conveys their capacity to process details like mouth and
eye shape as well as to move their own muscles in a way that produces similar patterns in their
faces. This raises the question whether infants at high-risk for autism, who later develop ASD,
have this same innate capability to process facial expressions and mimic them?
In development, a mimicry deficit could impair a childs ability to grasp others emotions,
and if such a deficit occurred early, it could impair the childs ability to form self-other
correspondences, perhaps contributing to autism. If young children with autism have a mimicry
decit, the processes of social-emotional development that rely on co-experiencing others
affective states may be impaired. For example, a decit in emotional contagion may prevent one
from developing the sense of intersubjectivity and emotional correspondence that are important
for understanding of other minds and social learning (Meltzoff & Gopnik, 1993).
A study examined the automatic and voluntary mimicry of emotional facial expression
among adolescents and adults with ASD and a typical sample matched on age, gender and
verbal intelligence. Participants viewed pictures of happy and angry expressions while the
activity over their cheek and brow muscle region was monitored with electromyography (EMG).
Participants with ASD did not automatically mimic facial expressions whereas the typically
developing participants did. However, both groups showed evidence of successful voluntary

mimicry. The data suggests that autism is associated with an impairment of a basic automatic
social-emotion process (McIntosh 2006).
Research has shown that automatic mimicry, a basic feature of social interaction, is
impaired in adolescents and adults with ASD. In the current body of research examining facial
mimicry has only been done with adolescents with ASD. The purpose of the study is to
determine how early this deficit in automatic mimicry is present and what its downstream
consequences are in relation to facial processing and recognition. Additionally it is know that
early engagement with faces relates to face-processing abilities later in life. Current research
has shown that facial processing differences have emerged around 7 months, but it is also
known that typically developing infants are sensitive to configural information in faces from at
least 4 months of age. The current study is aimed at examining the course of development of
facial processing and determining how early you can identify discrepancies between infants at
high-risk and low-risk for autism. The results of this study will fill a gap in the literature.

Method

Participants
This study will be conducted as a longitudinal projects. The study will be comparing infants
at high-risk for developing autism against infants at low-risk. The high-risk group will be
comprised of infants with an older sibling who has ASD. The control, low-risk group will be
infants with a typically developing older sibling. Participants in either group will be excluded from
participating in the study if they were born preterm, had low birth weight, medical or neurological
conditions, or sensory or motor problems. This is done in an attempt to exclude confounding
variables. Participants will enter the study as infants around 3-4 months. A follow up test will be
conducted when the participants are 2.5-3 years old, at the time when an official diagnosis
could be made.

Procedure
Two tasks will be administered when the infants come in for their first lab visit around 3-4
months of age.
The first task will assess automatic mimicry in infants. Infants will be shown a variety of
facial expressions on the screen. The stimuli will be eight angry and eight happy facial
expressions, sized 20 cm by 25 cm and presented on a 21-inch screen places about 60 cm
away from the participants. In this phase each trial will start with orienting tones. Mimicry will be
assessed using facial electromyography (EMG), which monitors electrical changes in muscle
activity over the cheek and brown region. This measure has multiple advantages in investigating
mimicry. First, EMGs temporal resolution and sensitivity can capture fast and subtle changes
during automatic mimicry. Second, as compared to self-report methods, EMG is less dependent
on factors such as verbal skills, praxis and motivation (McIntosh). While this doesnt affect our
participants when they are infants this will play a role when they are 3-years old. Non-language
dependent procedures are important for studying an atypical population in which self-report
methods may not be accurate.
The second task the infants will participate in is the Pop-Out Task. The infants looking
behavior will be recorded at 50 Hz using a Tobii eye tracker. The infants will be seated on their
caregivers lap, at 50-55 cm from the Tobii screen. 14 different slides with five images, on face
and four distracters will be presented. The faces in the images will be seven male and seven
female faces with direct gaze used as targets; the distractors will include phones, birds, cars,
and face visual noise images. Each slide will be presented for 15 seconds and in order to
maintain the infants attention the slides will be accompanied by unrelated music. The software
will collect data on where the infant spend the proportion of their time looking at. The pop-out
task has been reliably performed at 7 months, we are hoping to find significant data at 4 months
as well.

The infants will come back into the lab at around 2.5-3 years of age. They will run
through two tasks again.
The first task will be the Mimicry Task ask, both automatic and voluntary. Automatic
mimicry will first be evaluated in the same way that was done at 4 months. The participants will
simply be asked to watch the pictures as they appear on the screen. The second phase will
evaluate voluntary mimicry. The participants will be asked to make an expression just like this
one. EMG will monitor the electrical changes in the muscles of the face.
The second task the toddlers will participate in is the Face Recognition Task. E-prime
software will be used to present the children with 12 face recognition items on a 21 inch
touchscreen. The touchscreen task administer will ask the children to recognize newly viewed
faces after a short delay. The face recognition procedure will consist of a familiarization and
recognition phase. A central target face with a neutral facial expression or a closed mouth smile
will appear on the screen when the child attends. The experimenter will encourage the child to
pay attention to the face. After 5000 ms the target face will be replaced with an image of a
house and the experimenter will as Where did he/she go? He/She went into the house After a
delay the sound of a doorbell will be played and a house will be shown with a familiar and a
novel face display on the location of the window. The experimenter will then prompt the child to
touch the correct face. If the child answers correctly a smiley will appear on the screen, the child
would not receive feedback if they answered incorrectly.

Predicted Results
Based on the mimicry studies conducted with adolescents with ASD, I predict that
mimicry will be affected by ASD. I think we will find no significant deficit in voluntary imitation of
certain facial action however I think there will be a deficit in automatic mimicry in high-risk
infants. I think at age 3 years old high-risk participants may have more experience with

voluntary mimicry therefore they might be able to meet the demands of the task more easily. I
predict that high-risk infants may not possess the innate ability to process faces and mimic
them, but do go on to compensate for this and learn how to. Automatic mimicry occurs without
external prompting so it involves mere replication of the models facial expression without any
insight into the function of the behavior. A deficit in automatic mimicry would explain why
children with ASD have impairments in social communication and social interaction.
Based on previous studies about face processing in younger siblings with autism, I
expect that in the pop-out task the high-risk group at 4 months will spend a larger proportion of
time looking at the faces than in the low-risk control. I think differences in facial engagement
between the high-risk and low-risk group will emerge at 4 months. This is because typically
developing infants are sensitive to configural information in faces from at least 4 months of age.
I think there will be a strong relationship between face engagement and face recognition
performance because there is sensitive period of development where exposure to faces leads to
perceptual and cortical specialization. Therefore I predict that longer looking time at faces will be
correlated to poor facial recognition performance. I think we will find a reduced ability to
recognize familiar faces at 3 years in the high-risk group.. Previous studies have found that firstdegree relatives of individuals with ASD can exhibit face-processing difficulties.

Discussion
If young high-risk infants do display a deficit in mimicry, then that might subsequently
impair processes of social-emotional development. These results may provide insight into the
core deficits of autism. Automatic mimicry is a basic feature of social interaction, which is one of
core deficits in determining the diagnosis of autism. If deficits in automatic mimicry appear in
high-risk infants early in life, this might serve as an early identifier and can shape early
intervention. If children with ASD display deficits with automatic mimicry, but not voluntary

mimicry, this would suggest that the absence of automatic mimicry would not be due to deficits
in perception, motivation or task understanding.
If during the pop-out task high-risk infants do in fact spend more time looking at faces
and go on to demonstrate face recognition difficulties later in life, that may reflect an atypical
bias to attend to individual features of the face at 4 months, increasing the time needed to
process the whole face. If when tracking where on the face the infant spent the most time
examining, it turns out they spent the majority of the time looking at the eyes. This might mean
that high-risk infants who look proportionately longer at the face during the pop-out task who
perform poorly on the difficult items of face recognition have problem with processing
information from the eyes. This could shape early intervention, intervention can be aimed at
increasing the engagement with faces in infants at high-risk.

References

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