Roberto Keller’s research while affiliated with University of Turin and other places

Accurate face recognition is crucial for navigating social interactions. While neurotypical individuals generally show no issues with face processing, persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often exhibit impairments in this area. This study explores the extent of these face recognition deficits in autistic adults, focusing on their ability to identify famous faces, along with the awareness (metacognition) of their face recognition skills. Using the Italian Famous Face Test (IT-FFT) and the Prosopagnosia Index-20 (PI-20), to compare face recognition performance and self-awareness of face recognition abilities between 50 non-autistic and 49 individuals diagnosed with level 1 ASD. Autistic people had significantly lower face identification scores and greater difficulties recognizing famous faces than non-autistic participants. Additionally, autistic individuals reported more face recognition challenges on the PI-20, highlighting their awareness of these deficits. These findings suggest that face recognition impairments in ASD extend to famous faces and underscore the importance of further research to explore targeted interventions aimed at improving different aspects of face recognition in autistic people.

Accurate face recognition is crucial for navigating social interactions. While neurotypical individuals generally show no issues with face processing, persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder (PwASD) often exhibit impairments in this area. This study explores the extent of these face recognition deficits in autistic adults, focusing on their ability to identify famous faces, along with the awareness (metacognition) of their face recognition skills. Using the Italian Famous Face Test (IT-FFT) and the Prosopagnosia Index-20 (PI-20), to compare face recognition performance and self-awareness of face recognition abilities between 50 neurotypical individuals (NTs) and 49 PwASD. Our results showed that PwASD had significantly lower face identification scores and greater difficulties recognizing famous faces than NT participants. Additionally, PwASD reported more face recognition challenges on the PI-20, highlighting their awareness of these deficits. These findings suggest that face recognition impairments in PwASD extend to famous faces and underscore the importance of further research to explore targeted interventions aimed at improving different aspects of face recognition processes in ASD.

Autism is a lifelong condition, extending from early childhood and adolescence into adulthood, with different phenotypic expressions based on the individual’s life stage. Several aspects tend to improve during the transition from adolescent to adult age, including language and communication abilities, social-interaction skills, adaptive functioning, ritualistic behaviors, and sensory seekness. However, globally, adults with autism show reduced quality of life. Among factors which can have a significant impact on the long-term outcome, there are intellectual and communicative abilities, presence of physical and psychiatric comorbidities, and several environmental factors. At the moment, differences in developmental trajectories between males and females in adulthood have been scarcely investigated. Women seem to present specific psychiatric comorbidities compared to men (such as anxiety and mood disorders), a worse overall quality of life, and poorer social and employment outcome. Little is known regarding sex/gender-specific executive function profiles: men and women seem to present the same difficulties in mentalizing, recognition of facial emotions, and inhibitory control skills, while male individuals show greater difficulties in perceiving details, compared to females. The lack of information regarding sex/gender profiles of adults with autism draws attention to the need of developing further research on this topic.

Objective Borderline Intellectual Functioning (BIF) impacts cognitive functioning and adaptive behavior. Recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of Executive Functions trainings to support daily-living skills in several clinical populations. However, although the relationship between Executive Functions and BIF has been studied, few studies have explored the effects of cognitive enhancement training for BIF children. Given the pivotal significance of Executive Functions in learning, orchestrating cognitive processes, and modulating affective and behavioral responses, our study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of cognitive enhancement training targeting Executive Functions in a group of 23 children diagnosed with Borderline Intellectual Functioning devoid of neurodevelopmental impairments. Method We included a multiple assessment based on several informants (children, teachers, parents, and tutors) and provided individualized cognitive enhancement training focused on Executive Functions through both digital and analog activities. The training was highly customized, structured and monitored at various stages of the process activities. The training was composed of 20 sessions, each lasting 2 hours, held twice a week for each child. Results The obtained results confirmed the efficacy of cognitive enhancement training in improving Executive Functions, the primary target of the intervention, particularly in attention, verbal fluency, planning, inhibitory control, working memory, and flexibility. Furthermore, improvements were observed by all the informants in other cognitive functions, learning, and adaptive behaviors. Conclusions Our study contributes to the understanding of BIF, emphasizing the efficacy of neuropsychological enhancement through personalized training for EF.

Interpersonal touch plays a crucial role in shaping relationships and encouraging social connections. Failure in processing tactile input or abnormal tactile sensitivity may hamper social behaviors and have severe consequences in individuals' relational lives. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by both sensory disruptions and social impairments, making affective touch an ideal meeting point for understanding these features in ASD individuals. By integrating behavioral and physiological measures, we investigated the effects of affective touch on adult individuals with ASD from both an implicit and explicit perspective. Specifically, at an implicit level, we investigated whether and how receiving an affective touch influenced participants' skin conductance tonic and phasic components. At the explicit level, we delved into the affective and unpleasant features of affective touch. Overall, we observed lower skin conductance level in ASD compared to TD subjects. Interestingly, the typically developing (TD) group showed an increased autonomic response for affective touch compared to a control touch, while ASD subjects' autonomic response did not differ between the two conditions. Furthermore, ASD participants provided higher ratings for both the affective and unpleasant components of the touch, compared to TD subjects. Our results reveal a noteworthy discrepancy in ASD population between the subjective experience, characterized by amplified hedonic but also unpleasant responses, and the physiological response, marked by a lack of autonomic activation related to affective touch. This insightful dissociation seems crucial for a deeper understanding of the distinctive challenges characterizing people with ASD and may have implications for diagnosis and therapeutic approaches.

The faces we see in daily life exist on a continuum of familiarity, ranging from personally familiar to famous to unfamiliar faces. Thus, when assessing face recognition abilities, adequate evaluation measures should be employed to discriminate between each of these processes and their relative impairments. We here developed the Italian Famous Face Test (IT-FFT), a novel assessment tool for famous face recognition in typical and clinical populations. Normative data on a large sample (N = 436) of Italian neurotypical individuals (NT) were collected, assessing both familiarity (d-prime) and recognition accuracy. Next, we investigated the IT-FFA’s validity on a neurodevelopmental condition, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), often associated with face recognition deficits. Results showed ASDs’ difficulties in face recognition and in their ability to discriminate between famous and non-famous faces. Furthermore, this study explored whether both NTs and ASDs possess insights into their overall face recognition skills by correlating the Prosopagnosia Index-20 (PI-20) with the IT-FFT; a negative correlation between these measures in both groups suggests that even ASDs have insight into their (weaker) face recognition skills. Overall, our study provides the first online-based Italian test for famous faces (IT-FFT), demonstrates its sensitivity in detecting face difficulties in ASDs, and suggests spared face-related metacognitive skills in ASD.

Introduction This article addresses a topic that has been largely overlooked by scientific literature, namely pregnancy in autistic women. Generally, the issue of sexuality in disability, particularly in disabled women, autistic or otherwise, has been underexplored. However, it is necessary to scientifically investigate this topic to propose adequate social and health policies. Therefore, we chose to conduct a scoping review to answer three main questions: “What does it mean for an autistic woman to be pregnant?”; “How do these two conditions coexist?”; “Are health services prepared to receive this population adequately or does autism become a stigma for pregnant women?” Methods We conducted a systematic review and qualitative thematic synthesis following the Preferred Reporting Guidelines for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses on autistic women and pregnancy in the last 10 years. Results The studies included in our review are 7, extremely diverse in terms of methodologies and sample sizes. Despite the heterogeneity of samples and methodologies, all research tends to highlight the following results. For autistic women during pregnancy, three areas seem to be the most difficult: sensory issues, mood disorders, and relationships with specialists. Discussion Our study found that women with ASD face unique challenges during childbirth that differ from those of neurotypical women. Participants often felt belittled, ignored, and uninformed about the care they received, and being placed at the centre of attention was often seen as negative and hindering rather than positive. However, the research shows us how some “expected” results, such as difficulties in breastfeeding, have been disproven.

With the outburst of the COVID‐19 pandemic, disposable surgical face‐masks (DSFMs) have been widely adopted as a preventive measure. DSFMs hide the bottom half of the face, thus making identity and emotion recognition very challenging, both in typical and atypical populations. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often characterized by face processing deficits; thus, DSFMs could pose even a greater challenge for this population compared to typically development (TD) individuals. In this study, 48 ASDs of level 1 and 110 TDs underwent two tasks: (i) the Old‐new face memory task, which assesses whether DSFMs affect face learning and recognition, and (ii) the Facial affect task, which explores DSFMs' effect on emotion recognition. Results from the former show that, when faces were learned without DSFMs, identity recognition of masked faces decreased for both ASDs and TDs. In contrast, when faces were first learned with DSFMs, TDs but not ASDs benefited from a “context congruence” effect, that is, faces wearing DSFMs were better recognized if learned wearing DSFMs. In addition, results from the Facial affect task show that DSFMs negatively impacted specific emotion recognition in both TDs and ASDs, although differentially between the two groups. DSFMs negatively affected disgust, happiness and sadness recognition in TDs; in contrast, ASDs performance decreased for every emotion except anger. Overall, our study demonstrates a general, although different, disruptive effect on identity and emotion recognition both in ASD and TD population.

BACKGROUND: Several studies highlighted schizophrenic and bipolar disorders similar cerebral activation deficit patterns. Source information recall deficit is one of the several problems found in people with schizophrenia. METHODS: We wanted to test source monitoring deficit even in individuals with bipolar disorder, comparing both hospitalized schizophrenic and bipolar group in acute disorder phase (N.=36) with controls without psychiatric disorders (N.=28). Source monitoring is the ability to remember from where the information is acquired. As a matter of fact, for the evaluation of source monitoring deficits we assessed all the three groups with source monitoring tasks. Subsequently we tested our hypothesis through a one-way Anova Test with Jamovi suite. The source monitoring task is composed of four several conditions: “Picture,” “Hear,” “Self-generated” and “New.” All participants were asked to recall the type of target word presentation (image, heard, read) and fill out a grid with the different options. In “New” phase, participants had to report any word that was present in the grid but that was absent during the first phase of the task. RESULTS: Results showed no statistically significant differences between schizophrenic and bipolar participants. As a result, source monitoring deficits are a common deficit area among these two clinical conditions. Instead, when the comparison is made between experimental and control groups there are statistically significant results in different domains of source monitoring tasks. CONCLUSIONS: Participants with schizophrenia or bipolar disorders are less accurate to recall source information in “Picture” condition compared to healthy controls.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by typical pattern of communication and relational skills associated with repetitive verbal and motor behaviors and restricted patterns of interest. Among neurodevelopmental disorders, autistic students are at increased likeli- hood of being bullying victims. In autism, bullying victimization is significantly associated with internalized and externalized symptoms and poor quality of life. The present study aims to verify the presence of bullying victimization in autistic people, the distribution of such phenomenon among autism severity levels and inquires the presence of psychopathological co-occurrence in autistic adults who were victims of bullying with respect to non-bullied ones. The present study demonstrates that bullying is common among autistic people. Within autism wide expression range, bullying occurs in almost all situations related to ASD Level 1. Finally, bullying is a trigger for psychopathology in adolescence and adulthood.