The aim of this study was to investigate whether children with high-functioning autism (HFA) and Asperger’s syndrome (AS) can be differentiated from each other and from typically developing children in ability to recognize a human face. The present study included 69 participants: children with autism (high-functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome, n = 15 per group) and a control group of 39 typically developing children. It involved a face recognition task included in the NEPSY scale. Results showed that the autism groups performed poorer than the typically developing group, but no difference was found between high-functioning and Asperger groups. Both the information processing peculiarities of children with autism and their (interactional and communicative) social impairments could explain their difficulty to recognize human faces.
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