SATO Wataru Laboratory

Representational momentum for dynamic facial expressions in pervasive developmental disorder

(Uono, Sato, & Toichi: J Autism Dev Disord)

Individuals with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) have difficulty with social communication via emotional facial expressions, but behavioral studies involving static images have reported inconsistent findings about emotion recognition.

We investigated whether dynamic presentation of facial expression would enhance subjective perception of expressed emotion in 13 individuals with PDD and 13 healthy controls.
We presented dynamic and static emotional (fearful and happy) expressions.
Participants were asked to match a changeable emotional face display with the last presented image.

The results showed that both groups perceived the last image of dynamic facial expression to be more emotionally exaggerated than the static facial expression.

This finding suggests that individuals with PDD have an intact perceptual mechanism to process dynamic information in another individual's face.

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