Abstract
Patients with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) often have difficulty reading
facial expressions and deciphering their implied meaning. We focused on semantic encoding
related to face cognition to investigate event-related potentials (ERPs) to the subject’s
own face and familiar faces in children with and without PDD. Eight children with
PDD (seven boys and one girl; aged 10.8 ± 2.9 years; one left-handed) and nine age-matched typically developing children (four
boys and five girls; aged 11.3 ± 2.3 years; one left-handed) participated in this study. The stimuli consisted of three
face images (self, familiar, and unfamiliar faces), one scrambled face image, and
one object image (e.g., cup) with gray scale. We confirmed three major components:
N170 and early posterior negativity (EPN) in the occipito-temporal regions (T5 and
T6) and P300 in the parietal region (Pz). An enhanced N170 was observed as a face-specific
response in all subjects. However, semantic encoding of each face might be unrelated
to N170 because the amplitude and latency were not significantly different among the
face conditions. On the other hand, an additional component after N170, EPN which
was calculated in each subtracted waveform (self vs. familiar and familiar vs. unfamiliar),
indicated self-awareness and familiarity with respect to face cognition in the control
adults and children. Furthermore, the P300 amplitude in the control adults was significantly
greater in the self-face condition than in the familiar-face condition. However, no
significant differences in the EPN and P300 components were observed among the self-,
familiar-, and unfamiliar-face conditions in the PDD children. The results suggest
a deficit of semantic encoding of faces in children with PDD, which may be implicated
in their delay in social communication.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: September 01, 2008
Accepted:
April 24,
2008
Received in revised form:
March 14,
2008
Received:
October 29,
2007
Identification
Copyright
© 2008 Elsevier B.V. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
