My friend Ronke always sends me the most amazing information. She is brilliant and thoughtful and I honestly don't know how she finds the time to do research for me, but she does and she never fails to find something new and incredible for me to learn. So, in response to my post about Lexi's issues recognizing faces, she sent me a link to this video. It is lengthy, but in essence it is a lecture given at Yale about studies being done to learn more about the way autistic brains process facial information in comparisson to neurotypical brains. As Ronke explained in her message:
There's this really cool documentary that talks about how there is a region in the brain specialized for face recognition (the fusiform face area), and another that we use just for objects. It says that people with autism do not have activity in the face recognition region, but rely on the "object" recognition region when discriminating faces. Because the object recognition is not specialized for face recognition, they have to work much harder to recognize faces. I couldn't find it online, but this guy's stuff was referenced.
If you are at all interested in the topic, it is fascinating...
Now, there is very little uninterrupted time in my day, so I've been stealing minutes here and there to listen to this. And when I was only about half way through, I found myself riding alone in the car with Lexi and wondering how, if at all, she was coming along with her attempts to pay more attention to faces. Does she notice more now? Does she differentiate between features from one person to the next? So I asked her, and she said that she's trying to look at faces more at home, when she remembers. She's said that she's "too excited" when we're out places to remember to look at the faces around her because her "brain can only think about one thing at a time and then it's thinking about the exciting things."
So I asked her what things she's noticing about the faces in her family. For example, what things were different about Mommy and Daddy's faces? I figured that this was an easy place to start since Paulo and I look nothing alike. She thought for a moment and then said that Paulo's eyes were brown and mine were hazel. I asked her what else she noticed, and she went to the hair, so I redirected her. What about our faces were different? How were our noses different, or our mouths? She didn't know. They looked the same to her, she said. In fact, she couldn't come up with any other differences in our faces besides the hair and eye color.
Next I asked her about her friends, and she was quick to assure me that she was getting better with them. I asked her speciaifcally about two little girls she likes to play with (we'll call them S and B). Both girls are about the same height and size. They both have blond hair and blue eyes, so how can she tell them apart? "Oh, that's easy!" she explained, "I know S's voice is different!" But when asked if she could tell them apart if they stood side-by-side and didn't speak she wasn't so confident. "That would be tough," she conceded.
So our next project may be a face book for her. I'm going to try to collect pictures of all the friends and family we interact with and print them as 8x11s to put into a book. Hopefully, we can use this book to help her compare features, recognize the differences in people's faces, and boost her ability to "name that friend" even if they're not in their usual context. I'll try to let you know what we learn!
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