Academic Publications  

The articles listed below describe CARTE's scientific philosophy to intervention and empirical findings that support our treatment approach.

1.) Gordon, I., Pierce, M.D., Bartlett, M.S., & Tanaka, J.W. (2014). Training Facial Expression Production in Children on the Autism Spectrum. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 44, 2486-2498. doi: 10.1007/s10803-014-2118-6. PDF

This paper is about CARTE's Face Maze where 30 individuals on the autism spectrum played Face Maze to practice making 'happy' and 'angry' expressions. Participants showed reliable increases in the quality of their happy and angry expressions after playing Face Maze.

2.) Halliday, D.W.R., MacDonald, S.W.S., Sherf, S.K., & Tanaka, J.W. (2014). A reciprocal model of face recognition and autistic traits: Evidence from an individual differences perspective. PLoS ONE 9(5). PDF

This paper connects the traits seen in autism with cognitive styles involved in face and object perception. In a population of typically developed undergraduate students, levels of autistic traits predicted face recognition behaviour. This research supports the link between the autism phenotype and problems recognizing faces.

3.) Tanaka, J.W., Wolf, J. M., Klaiman, C., Koenig, K., Cockburn, J., Herlihy, L., Brown, C., Stahl, S., Kaiser, M.D., and Schultz, R.T. (2010). Using computerized games to teach face recognition skills to children with autism spectrum disorder: The Let's Face It! program, Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 51, 944-952. PDF

This paper describes a randomized clinical trial where playing 20 hours of the Let's Face It! program was sufficient to improve a child's holistic face processing abilites relative to the children in the control group.

3.) Wolf., J.M., Tanaka, J.W., Klaiman, C., Cockburn, J. Herlihy, L., Brown, C., South, M., McPartland, J., Kaiser, M. D., Phillips, R. and Schultz, R. T. (2008). Specific impairment of face processing abilities in children with autism spectrum disorder using the Let's Face It! Skills Battery, Autism Research. PDF

This article describes a study that tested the face rand object recognition skills of children with autism using the Let's Face It! Skills Battery. Not unexpectedly, children with ASD do not do as well on some face-related tasks compared to control participants. Remarkably, there are other areas where the children with ASD actually perform as well or even better than their non-ASD counterparts.

4.) Cockburn, J., Bartlett, M., Tanaka, J., Movellan, J., Pierce, M. & Schultz, R. (2008). SmileMaze: A tutoring system in real-time facial expression perception and production in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Proceedings from the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face & Gesture Recognition, 978-986. PDF

In this paper, Jeff Cockburn describes an exciting new game, 'Smile Maze' that teaches children how to recognize and produce facial expressions via a web cam. The program uses state-of-the-art computer techniques in expression recognition developed by the Machine Perception Lab at UC San Diego.

5.) Tanaka, J., Lincoln, S., & Hegg, L. (2003). A framework for the study and treatment of face processing deficits in autism. In H. Leder and G. Swartzer (Eds.) The Development of Face Processing, 101-119, Berlin: Hogrefe Publishers. PDF

Here, we describe the theoretical rationale behind our Let's Face It! training program drawing on research in the autism field.