Neutral versus emotional human stimuli processing in children with pervasive developmental disorders not otherwise specified

Pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) represents up to two-thirds of autism spectrum disorders; however, it is usually described in terms of the symptoms not shared by autism. The study explores processing of neutral and emotional human stimuli (by auditory, visual and multimodal channels) in children with PDD-NOS (n = 10) compared to typically developing children (n = 35). The neutral human stimuli consisted of faces and common first names. The emotional human stimuli consisted of happy, sad, angry, and neutral faces and vocalizations. The results confirmed previous findings and led to others. The PDD-NOS group (a) accurately processed neutral human stimuli; (b) had difficulty processing emotional stimuli in general and more easily identified happy compared to angry or neutral faces and vocalizations; (c) had a strong discrepancy between emotional and neutral human stimuli processing; (d) used the multimodal channel to compensate for unimodal deficits, especially for angry faces; and (e) was strongly heterogeneous.