Reprint of "Ensemble perception of emotions in autistic and typical children and adolescents"

Ensemble perception, the ability to assess automatically the summary of large amounts of information presentedin visual scenes, is available early in typical development. This ability might be compromised in autistic chil-dren, who are thought to present limitations in maintaining summary statistics representations for the recenthistory of sensory input. Here we examined ensemble perception of facial emotional expressions in 35 autisticchildren, 30 age- and ability-matched typical children and 25 typical adults. Participants received three tasks: a)an‘ensemble’emotion discrimination task; b) a baseline (single-face) emotion discrimination task; and c) a facialexpression identification task. Children performed worse than adults on all three tasks. Unexpectedly, autisticand typical children were, on average, indistinguishable in their precision and accuracy on all three tasks.Computational modelling suggested that, on average, autistic and typical children used ensemble-encodingstrategies to a similar extent; but ensemble perception was related to non-verbal reasoning abilities in autisticbut not in typical children. Eye-movement data also showed no group differences in the way children attended tothe stimuli. Our combinedfindings suggest that the abilities of autistic and typical children for ensemble per-ception of emotions are comparable on average