Developing Visual Systems

Presented by Ruth Elaine Hane and Margaret Creedon, PhD at the Fall 2012 Autism Research Institute Conference.

Please Note: This presentation is over a decade old. Some data and theories may be outdated. We keep this and other older presentations available to demonstrate the evolution of autism understanding and care, and to ensure that autistic voices from the past continue to be heard.

Brief Overview:

• Core Issue & Learning: Processing faces and understanding emotional changes are key characteristics of autism. The speakers propose that improved eye contact and face processing can be learned through structured intervention, contrary to past medical beliefs.

• Prosopagnosia (Face Blindness): Speaker Ruth Elaine shared her personal experience with prosopagnosia (the inability to process and remember faces) and a lack of central vision development, which meant she saw her mother’s face as “blank”.

• The H Face Window: Ruth Elaine developed the H Face Window as a physical product—a structure placed over the face when talking—to provide a dual system of structure for creating a systematic way of viewing and processing the face.

• Sensory and Early Life Trauma: Ruth Elaine was born under highly stressful circumstances (mother’s illness, Rubella measles, severe snowstorm) and experienced overly sensitive sensory systems, incessant crying, and tactile difficulties.

• Coping Strategies: Ruth Elaine developed various self-soothing and coping strategies, including seeking proprioceptive comfort by sleeping under a feather tick (like a weighted blanket) and recognizing people by the clothing they wore (e.g., her mother’s apron).

• Self-Correction Techniques: As an adult, to overcome her face blindness, Ruth Elaine practiced intensely for a year, including wearing a paper bag over her head with cutout holes to reduce her visual field. This exercise, based on advice from a specialist she met as a child, finally enabled her to see and begin to remember her own face.

• Eye-Tracking Differences: Research shows that neurotypical individuals typically look at a face in a triangle pattern (eyes, nose, mouth), while the autistic group often shows confused, scribbling, or stuck patterns (e.g., focused solely on the nose or one side), preventing them from capturing the full facial image.

• Sensory Overload: For a child with autism, eye-to-eye contact can trigger sensory overload, causing the brain’s amygdala to initiate a fight-or-flight response, which leads to increased heart rate and the instinct to back up and escape.

• Prevalence: Developmental face blindness is estimated to affect about 2% of the general population, and some degree of it is hypothesized to exist among all persons on the spectrum, potentially leading to impaired social development.

• Depth Perception Factor: Studies suggest that challenges with depth perception may be a factor, as some autistic viewers were able to recognize flat pictures of their mothers but not their real, three-dimensional faces.

Published: 12/05/2012

Ms. Hane, a health consultant, was born with Infantile Autism. Defying a prediction of intellectual disability in grade school, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude with a B.S. in human ecology. She overcame Prosopagnosia (face blindness) inventing the Hane Face Window® based on structural learning. Ruth Elaine was recently the Midwest Director for the Autism Society of America. She is a contributing author to Sharing Our Wisdom, and Ask and Tell, plus numerous articles about autism. She is the owner of owner of Chi Field Healthcare Minneapolis, MN.