University of Houston researcher studies how children with autism process faces

Key Takeaways 

• University of Houston psychologist Jason Griffin studies how children with autism experience social interactions. Inspired in part by growing up with an autistic brother, Griffin is developing new ways to study how children look at and process faces.  

• UH Health laboratory combines EEG brain measurements with wearable, eye-tracking technology to capture more than behavior alone. By studying where children look and what their brains are doing at the same time, Griffin hopes to better understand differences in social attention and development.  

• The work could give researchers a fuller picture of autism and how face processing develops. A recent University of Houston-Yale collaboration, involving nearly 400 autistic children, found differences in brain activity related to face processing and in how those patterns changed with age—providing new clues for understanding autism. 

HOUSTON, Nov. 9 – In a study of nearly 400 autistic children, University of Houston and Yale University researchers found measurable differences in brain activity associated with face processing. They also found that patterns of face processing developed differently with age in autistic children compared with neurotypical children.  

University of Houston psychologist Jason Griffin, who grew up with an autistic brother, has spent his career trying to better understand how children with autism experience the social world. At the Griffin Laboratory on the University of Houston campus, he is developing new ways to study what happens when children look at faces during social interactions, combining wearable eye-tracking with brain measurements to capture something traditional laboratory tests can miss. 

The work builds on Griffin’s recent collaboration with researchers at Yale on one of the most comprehensive studies to date examining face processing in autistic children. Published in Nature Mental Health, the study included nearly 400 autistic children and looked at brain activity as they viewed faces. 

Understanding how autistic children process faces could help researchers better understand differences in social attention and development. For many autistic people, looking at faces and making eye contact can be difficult. Some also have more difficulty remembering faces or recognizing facial emotions than their neurotypical peers. 

The researchers found that they could more easily determine whether a neurotypical child was looking at a face based on patterns of brain activity. In autistic children, those patterns were less distinct. 

“The neural activity that we measure at the scalp is just not as distinct in autistic children,” said Griffin, the study’s first author. 

The findings also point to differences in how face processing develops over childhood. Among neurotypical children, the researchers' ability to predict where a child was looking increased with age. That pattern did not appear in the autistic children in the study. 

“Their face-specific processing is not following the same trajectory,” Griffin said. 

Seeing Autism in a Different Way 

Researchers found that brain activity associated with viewing faces was less distinct in autistic children than in neurotypical children. They also found differences in how face processing changed as children grew older.  

Griffin has recently received a 5-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health in addition to a grant from the Alan B. Slifka Foundation to advance autism research. The research is part of Griffin’s broader effort to understand autism by looking at what is happening in the brain rather than simply measuring whether a child behaves in a way that is considered typical. 

That distinction matters to families like Hannah Weier’s. After reading about Griffin’s research at UH, Weier enrolled her 10-year-old daughter, Evie, in studies at the Griffin Laboratory.