( Everyday Life with Autism )

Neuroscientists in Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) discovered a brain odditiy in individuals with autism that explains the deficit in identifying faces . This deficit in turn explains the behavioral disorder in social interactions, which is one of the most common traits of autism.

They suggest that the level of behavioral deficit may be linked to the level of neurological disorders. The part of the brain that recognizes and processes faces is called fusifrom face area (FFA). If this part in the brain has anomaly, faces are broadly “tuned” to precisely distinguish different people’s faces and features.

This research has been done using function Magnetic Reasonance Imagiang (fMRI). In neuro typical (NT) individuals, neurons  in FFA are expected to capture specific characteristics of different faces, or “fine tune” to make distinction between faces.

It was found that the more severe the behavior was, the more broadly tuned the neurons were.

A very interesting intervention was done to improve the face recognition ability in people with autism. Participant were shown pairs of faces that are clearly different from one another. Gradually, they narrowed down the differences in faces and increased the similarity. Researchers found that the FFA tuning has improved as well as the ability to recognize faces.

I believe that this research has uncovered a huge mistery for me. With this finding in mind, let’s try to put ourselves in an autistic person’s place. Try to imagine all these faces, that more or less look alike, are surrounding you. How would you be able to respond to every person individually if you can not tell them apart.

I am so impressed with this new research. It will definitely help me to better understand the kids I work with.

Please enjoy reading the full article here:

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130318151530.htm

nadia shanab

Tags: autism, communication, health, parenting, research, social interaction