Self-reported face recognition abilities moderately predict face-learning skills: Evidence from Italian samples

Unveiling Face Recognition Challenges and Awareness in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Insights from the Italian Famous Face Test (IT-FFT)

Accurate face recognition is crucial for navigating social interactions. While neurotypical individuals generally show no issues with face processing, persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often exhibit impairments in this area. This study explores the extent of these face recognition deficits in autistic adults, focusing on their ability to identify famous faces, along with the awareness (metacognition) of their face recognition skills. Using the Italian Famous Face Test (IT-FFT) and the Prosopagnosia Index-20 (PI-20), to compare face recognition performance and self-awareness of face recognition abilities between 50 non-autistic and 49 individuals diagnosed with level 1 ASD. Autistic people had significantly lower face identification scores and greater difficulties recognizing famous faces than non-autistic participants. Additionally, autistic individuals reported more face recognition challenges on the PI-20, highlighting their awareness of these deficits. These findings suggest that face recognition impairments in ASD extend to famous faces and underscore the importance of further research to explore targeted interventions aimed at improving different aspects of face recognition in autistic people.

Exploring insight into unfamiliar face recognition ability: The case from developmental prosopagnosia

This study aims to explore the relationship between face processing ability and individuals' insight into that ability, with a particular focus on those who 'self-refer' as having face recognition difficulties; namely, individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DP). Specifically, the study examines whether self-referred individuals represent a subpopulation with elevated levels of insight into their face recognition performance compared to the general population. Using Bayesian hierarchical modelling, we compared performance across the 'objective' Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT) and the 'subjective' 20-item Prosopagnosia Index (PI20) in self-referred DP individuals (N = 279) and normative populations (N = 1,344)-this statistical approach allows for flexible, probabilistic predictions about performance based on subjective insight and group membership, enabling more nuanced comparisons. Despite hypotheses that self-referring participants might demonstrate superior metacognitive insight, results showed no credible evidence of enhanced alignment between PI20 and CFMT measures in this group compared to normative samples. Overall, these findings underscore the limitations of current diagnostic tools, emphasizing the need for psychometric refinement to address measurement noise and improve the reliability of subjective self-assessments. This work contributes to understanding individual variability in cognitive insight and highlights the challenges of identifying DP based on subjective and objective alignment.

Investigating the stability of individual differences in face recognition behavior

Individual differences in face recognition abilities are characterized as heritable and resilient to change. However, this work is largely based on inter-individual differences, tends to include participants with extreme behavior (e.g., prosopagnosia, super-recognizers), and does not accommodate patterns of bias in intra-individual recognition behavior. Here, we investigated the continuity and stability of intra-individual differences in face recognition behavior among emerging adults using two tasks of unfamiliar face recognition that differ in the gender of the faces to be recognized. Although the estimate of stability is high (0.71) across the sample, there are instabilities in the behavior of many individual participants. For example, approximately 16.7% of the sample exhibited a discrepancy between tasks that was larger than 1 SD. Also, stability was more characteristic of extreme behavior. This is a bit surprising given the potential for close generalization of performance across these two tasks (identical structure and similar stimuli). Inter-individual differences in participant characteristics (i.e., gender, age, social skills) do not explain this variability. These findings are difficult to accommodate into current models of individual differences in face recognition behavior.

Asymmetries run deep: the interplay between cradling bias, face recognition, autistic traits, and personality

Personality traits are linked to a variety of cognitive and socio-emotional factors, including lateralization patterns. Autism, prosopagnosia, and atypical cradling have been associated with altered lateralization and socio-emotional processing. This study explores how autism traits, cradling-side preferences, and face recognition abilities relate to individual personality differences. Three-hundred neurotypical adults (150 males) completed an online survey including the imaged cradling preference and three validated questionnaires: the Autism spectrum Quotient (AQ), Prosopagnosia Index-20 (PI-20), and the Big Five Personality Questionnaire (BFQ). Results showed a strong left-cradling bias (LCB) unaffected by sex, handedness, parental status, autism traits, or face recognition abilities. AQ negatively predicted Extraversion, Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, and Openness. LCB correlated with higher Agreeableness and moderated the negative association between AQ and Extraversion. These findings suggest a potential link between cradling preferences, autism traits, and personality, possibly reflecting reduced right-hemisphere specialization in emotional processing and social behaviour.

Autistic adults have insight into their relative face recognition ability

The PI20 is a self-report questionnaire that assesses the presence of lifelong face recognition difficulties. The items on this scale ask respondents to assess their face recognition ability relative to the rest of the population, either explicitly or implicitly. Recent reports suggest that the PI20 scores of autistic participants exhibit little or no correlation with their performance on the Cambridge Face Memory Test-a key measure of face recognition ability. These reports are suggestive of a meta-cognitive deficit whereby autistic individuals are unable to infer whether their face recognition is impaired relative to the wider population. In the present study, however, we observed significant correlations between the PI20 scores of 77 autistic adults and their performance on two variants of the Cambridge Face Memory Test. These findings indicate that autistic individuals can infer whether their face recognition ability is impaired. Consistent with previous research, we observed a wide spread of face recognition abilities within our autistic sample. While some individuals approached ceiling levels of performance, others met the prevailing diagnostic criteria for developmental prosopagnosia. This variability showed little or no association with non-verbal intelligence, autism severity, or the presence of co-occurring alexithymia or ADHD.

Normative data of the Italian Famous Face Test

The faces we see in daily life exist on a continuum of familiarity, ranging from personally familiar to famous to unfamiliar faces. Thus, when assessing face recognition abilities, adequate evaluation measures should be employed to discriminate between each of these processes and their relative impairments. We here developed the Italian Famous Face Test (IT-FFT), a novel assessment tool for famous face recognition in typical and clinical populations. Normative data on a large sample (N = 436) of Italian individuals were collected, assessing both familiarity (d') and recognition accuracy. Furthermore, this study explored whether individuals possess insights into their overall face recognition skills by correlating the Prosopagnosia Index-20 (PI-20) with the IT-FFT; a negative correlation between these measures suggests that people have a moderate insight into their face recognition skills. Overall, our study provides the first online-based Italian test for famous faces (IT-FFT), a test that could be used alongside other standard tests of face recognition because it complements them by evaluating real-world face familiarity, providing a more comprehensive assessment of face recognition abilities. Testing different aspects of face recognition is crucial for understanding both typical and atypical face recognition.

What is developmental about developmental prosopagnosia?

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is characterised by difficulties recognising face identities and is associated with diverse co-occurring object recognition difficulties. The high co-occurrence rate and heterogeneity of associated difficulties in DP is an intrinsic feature of developmental conditions, where co-occurrence of difficulties is the rule, rather than the exception. However, despite its name, cognitive and neural theories of DP rarely consider the developmental context in which these difficulties occur. This leaves a large gap in our understanding of how DP emerges in light of the developmental trajectory of face recognition. Here, we argue that progress in the field requires re-considering the developmental origins of differences in face recognition abilities, rather than studying the end-state alone. In practice, considering development in DP necessitates a re-evaluation of current approaches in recruitment, design, and analyses.