Italian Famous Face Test: Normative data from neurotypical individuals and efficacy in detecting face recognition difficulties in Autism Spectrum Disorder

The faces we see in daily life exist on a continuum of familiarity, ranging from personally familiar to famous to unfamiliar faces. Thus, when assessing face recognition abilities, adequate evaluation measures should be employed to discriminate between each of these processes and their relative impairments. We here developed the Italian Famous Face Test (IT-FFT), a novel assessment tool for famous face recognition in typical and clinical populations. Normative data on a large sample (N= 436) of Italian neurotypical individuals (NT) were collected, assessing both familiarity (<i>d</i>’) and recognition accuracy. Next, we investigated the IT-FFA’s validity on a neurodevelopmental condition, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), often associated with face recognition deficits. Results showed ASDs’ difficulties in face recognition and in their ability to discriminate between famous and non-famous faces. Furthermore, this study explored whether both NTs and ASDs possess insights into their overall face recognition skills by correlating the Prosopagnosia Index-20 (PI-20) with the IT-FFT; a negative correlation between these measures in both groups suggests that even ASDs have insight into their (weaker) face recognition skills. Overall, our study provides the first online-based Italian test for famous faces (IT-FFT), demonstrates its sensitivity in detecting face difficulties in ASDs, and suggests spared face-related metacognitive skills in ASD.