以变形卡片排序作业探讨台湾亚斯伯格症成人对脸孔及物体的区辨能力

Exploring Face and Object Discrimination in Taiwan Residents Adults with Asperger Syndrome: A Morphing Card Ordering Task

不论是有生命的人物或是无生命的物体,能够成功的区辨它们乃是人们生存的必要条件。先前研究指出自闭症族群的脸孔辨认能力有不等程度的缺损,但辨认物体能力完好无缺。本研究以台湾地区的亚斯伯格/高功能自闭症成人族群和一般成人为研究对象, 探讨自闭症族群是否倾向以注意局部细节特征的处理策略来区辨物体和脸孔。本研究的主要作业为卡片排序作业,实验刺激为亚洲人与白种人变形脸孔(男性、女性)以及变形物体(车子、茶壶、马);次要作业为中文版成人自闭特质量表(AQ)。本研究招收亚斯伯格症/高功能自闭症族群(AQ平均分数37.58)以及年龄配对的一般成人(AQ平均分数21.08)各26位,结果显示:在变形脸孔卡片排序作业中,亚斯伯格族群(M = 0.70)的正确率略高于一般成人(M = 0.61),两组成人的错误型态分析也相当一致。在变形物体卡片排序作业中,亚斯伯格族群(M = 0.87)的正确率显著高于一般成人(M = 0.77);此外,错误型态分析显示亚斯伯格族群如果放错卡片,有更高比例仅错放一格。整体而言,本研究以变形卡片排序作业揭示亚斯伯格族群对于辨识脸孔的细微变化并不亚于一般成人,对于辨认物体的细微变化更优于一般成人。这代表的是亚斯伯格族群较擅长用特征式处理的策略,并以此策略来弥补辨识脸孔缺损的能力。

Successful recognition of faces and objects surrounding us is fundamental to survival. Previous studies showed that healthy adults performed better than individuals with autism on face recog-nition, but not on object recognition. However, the evidence has been inconclusive. The present study investigated the perceptual sensitivity on face and object discrimination in Taiwan Residents adults with Asperger syndrome (AS) or high-functioning autism (HFA) and age-matched healthy controls. We adopted two tasks: the AQ questionnaire and a morphed card-ordering task (7 sets of morphed-images of faces (4 sets) and objects (3 sets)). We recruited 26 AS/HFA adults (mean AQ score = 37.58) and 26 healthy controls (mean AQ score = 21.08). Results showed that in the morphing-face-ordering task, the AS/HFA exhibited a marginally higher accuracy, and the error pattern was similar to that of the healthy controls. In the morphing-object-ordering task, the AS/HFA adults exhibited a significantly higher accuracy, and the pattern of errors was more re-stricted than that of the healthy control. Our finding reveals that, comparing to the healthy adults, the AS/HFA group performed better on detecting subtle changes in the object stimuli, while performed equally well on the face stimuli. This suggests that the AS/HFA group may have adopted a feature-based strategy to process images of morphed objects and faces.