De-gendering and dehumanization in mental representations of autistic men’s and women’s facial appearance (opens in new tab)

Mental representations of autistic people’s character (i.e., what they are like) are often negative and even dehumanizing. Yet the potential role of gender in shaping such mental representations has rarely been considered, a pattern mirroring the dearth of autism research on autistic women. Using a reverse-correlation image-classification technique, we tested whether dehumanization is evident in visualizations of autistic (vs. neurotypical) men’s and women’s facial appearance (i.e., what they...