Labelling faces as ‘Autistic’ reduces the inversion effect

To address this question, we used the inversion effect as a marker of face recognition. In Experiment 1, participants completed a recognition task involving upright and inverted faces labelled as either ‘regular’ or ‘autistic’.

In reality, the faces presented in both conditions were identical. Results revealed a smaller inversion effect for faces labelled as autistic. Thus, simply labelling a face as ‘autistic’ disrupts recognition.