Multimodal investigations of human face perception in neurotypical and autistic adults

Faces are among the most important visual stimuli that we perceive in everyday life. Although there is a plethora of literature studying many aspects of face perception, the vast majority of them focuses on a single aspect of face perception using unimodal approaches. In this review, we advocate for studying face perception using multimodal cognitive neuroscience approaches. We highlight two case studies: the first study investigates ambiguity in facial expressions of emotion, and the second study investigates social trait judgment. In the first set of studies, we revealed an event-related potential that signals emotion ambiguity and we found convergent response to emotion ambiguity using functional neuroimaging and single-neuron recordings. In the second set of studies, we discussed recent findings about neural substrates underlying comprehensive social evaluation, and the relationship between personality factors and social trait judgements. Notably, in both sets of studies, we provided an in-depth discussion of altered face perception in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and offered a computational account for the behavioral and neural markers of atypical facial processing in ASD. Finally, we suggest new perspectives for studying face perception. All data discussed in the case studies of this review are publicly available.