Friday, 2 May 2008
9:00 - 10:00 AM

The Seminar will be held in the Gonda Center First Floor Conference Room, Rm 1357
E5 on the South sector of the UCLA Campus Map.

All are welcome!

For further information contact Candace Wilkinson at (310) 825-9041.

Lecture Abstract
Many of the early social impairments in autism, such as eye contact, joint attention, responses to emotional displays, and face recognition, involve the ability to attend to and process information from the face. In studies with children and adults with autism, basic processing of faces has been found to be impaired using behavioral measures (decreased perception and recognition), electrophysiology (slowed processing speed), and functional imaging (abnormal cortical organization). Several questions remain. First, are face processing deficits a(n) (endo)phenotype of autism or reflect a specific developmental challenge? Second, is face processing a building block for higher order social processes? Third, can face processing deficits be remediated by training individuals how to look at faces? And fourth, does face training improve social understanding? To address these questions, recent results from a series of multimodal imaging studies (eye tracking, EEG and fMRI) will be presented.