Autism Spectrum Disorder Moderate the Effect of Age on N170 Latency to Faces in Middle Childhood

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Developmental Disabilities

Abstract

Background: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently demonstrate impairments in the ability to accurately categorize and label the emotional facial expressions of others (Lozier et al., 2014). This is reflected in reduced behavioral performance during tasks of facial emotion recognition (FER; Harms et al., 2010) as well as in atypical neural processing of emotional facial expressions (Aoki at el., 2015). One early neural marker of face perception is the N170 event-related potential (ERP). For typically-developing (TD) individuals, improvements in face perception abilities are reflected in earlier N170 latencies across age (Batty & Taylor, 2006), and vary as a function of intensity (Almeida et al., 2016). On average, N170 latencies to faces are delayed for individuals with ASD compared to their TD peers (Kang et al., 2018). However, the modulation of neural response to faces by ASD symptomology and age has yet to be investigated, and may offer further insight into the processes underlying emotional face perception in ASD populations.

Methods: Children with and without ASD (N=71; ages 6 – 10; Table 1) completed a web-based emotion recognition task (Russo-Ponsaran et al., 2019) and viewed images of emotional faces (happy, sad, angry, scared, and okay). Each emotion was displayed at 4 intensity levels (1, 4, 7, 10) presented in random order while EEG was recorded. N170 ERPs were extracted from lateral posterior electrodes (P7 and P8). Multiple moderated regression models examined the effect of ASD symptoms (continuous and categorical) on the relation between age, emotion intensity, and N170 latency.

Results: The relationship between age and N170 latency (at P8) was moderated by ASD status, t(7, 276)=-2.64, p=0.009, such that youth with ASD (but not without) demonstrated a decrease in 4.53 ms of N170 latency for every additional year of age. Additionally, the relationship between age and N170 latency (at P8) was moderated by continuous ASD symptoms (i.e., SRS-2), t(7, 276)=-3.26, p=0.001. Post-hoc omnibus groups regions of significance analysis indicates that among youth with 1 standard deviation higher ASD symptomology, every additional year of age yields a decrease in 8.14 ms of N170 latency (Figure 1).

Conclusions: Consistent with previous literature, neural differences were only observed in the right hemisphere (i.e. P8) reflecting a hemispheric dominance of processing elicited by FER tasks (Batty & Taylor, 2006). Additionally, the relationship between N170 latency and age was found to be significantly moderated by ASD symptom severity. These results suggest that, compared to younger youth with ASD, older youth with ASD are quicker at processing emotional faces, similar to their typically developing peers of the same age. Thus, youth with ASD may have different, protracted maturational patterns of FER development compared to their TD peers. Indeed, TD peers likely go through similar changes but at an earlier age (Webb et al., 2006) and may change less during middle childhood, consistent with these results. Middle childhood may represent a time when some youth with ASD “catch up” to their TD peers in terms of early face processing, and provide an opportunity for enhancing social learning.

Authors

• Sara Medina-DeVilliers, Stony Brook Unviersity
  Presenting Author

• Talena Day, Stony Brook Unviersity
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kathryn Hauschild, Farmingdale State College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Matthew D Lerner, Stony Brook Unviersity
  Non-Presenting Author