Abstract We investigated whether children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) have a deficit in recognising familiar faces. Children with ASD were given a forced choice familiar face recognition task with three conditions: full faces, inner face parts and outer face parts. Control groups were children with devel- opmental delay (DD) and typically developing (TD) children. Children with ASD and children with DD recognised slightly fewer faces than did TD children, but there was no ASD-specific deficit. All groups displayed the same pattern of face part superiority: full- face superiority over inner face, and inner face superi- ority over outer face. Therefore, the pattern of familiar face recognition by children with ASD was similar to the pattern found in other children. Keywords Autism Æ Children Æ Familiar face Æ Part face Abbreviations ASD Autistic Spectrum Disorders DD Developmental Delay TD Typically Developing BPVS British Picture Vocabulary Scale VMA Verbal Mental Age CA Chronological Age Introduction Face recognition, which involves processing and recalling faces, is a key skill required for effective communication and socialisation. Faces provide a channel for communication during infancy (Nelson, 2001) and remain integral to communication and socialisation throughout childhood and into adulthood (Schultz et al., 2000). In particular, the ability to learn unfamiliar faces and to recall familiar faces are important aspects of social functioning. For these reasons the development of face processing abilities has been extensively studied in typical and atypical development. In typical development the processing style used to recognise faces reflects a developmental progression from the use of featural to configural information (Carey & Diamond, 1994; Maurer, Le Grand, & Mondloch, 2002). Faces are initially recognised using featural information with a trend towards greater reliance on the spatial relationship between features (the configuration) with age (Maurer et al., 2002). There is also evidence that a difference in processing style for familiar and unfamiliar faces emerges with age (e.g. Bonner & Burton, 2004; Campbell et al., 1999; Want, Pascalis, Coleman, & Blades, 2003). Children initially recognise familiar and unfamiliar faces using similar methods, however by adulthood unfamiliar and familiar faces are processed differently (Burton, Wilson, Cowan, & Bruce, 1999). An impor- tant aspect of this difference is that the inner face parts (see Fig. 1) are relied on more for familiar face rec- ognition, but the outer face parts (see Fig. 2) are relied on to a greater extent in unfamiliar face recognition (Bruce et al., 1999; Ellis, Shepherd, & Davies, 1979; R. Wilson (&) Æ O. Pascalis Æ M. Blades Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK e-mail: Rebecca.Wilson@sheffield.ac.uk J Autism Dev Disord DOI 10.1007/s10803-006-0169-z 123 ORIGINAL PAPER Familiar Face Recognition in Children with Autism; the Differential use of Inner and Outer Face Parts Rebecca Wilson Æ Olivier Pascalis Æ Mark Blades Ó Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006