**Do autistic adults have insight into their relative face recognition ability?** <br><br> Bayparvah Kaur Gehdu, Clare Press, Katie L. H. Gray & Richard Cook <br><br> Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, U.K. **Abstract**<br> The PI20 is a self-report questionnaire that assesses the presence of lifelong face recognition difficulties. The items on this scale ask respondents to assess their face recognition ability relative to the rest of the population, either explicitly (e.g., “My face recognition ability is worse than most people”) or implicitly (e.g., “When I was at school, I struggled to recognize my classmates”). There is now considerable evidence that non-autistic participants have enough insight to provide meaningful responses to these items. However, it has been reported that the PI20 scores of autistic participants exhibit little or no correlation with their performance on the Cambridge Face Memory Test. This result suggests a meta-cognitive deficit whereby autistic individuals are unable to infer whether their face recognition is impaired relative to the wider population. In the present study, however, we observed significant correlations between the PI20 scores of 77 autistic adults and their performance on two different versions of the Cambridge Face Memory Test. Our findings indicate that autistic individuals can infer whether their face recognition ability is impaired and confirms that the PI20 can be used to screen autistic individuals for face recognition difficulties. Consistent with previous research we observed a wide spread of face recognition abilities within our autistic sample. While some individuals approached ceiling levels of performance, others met the prevailing diagnostic criteria for developmental prosopagnosia. This variability showed little or no association with non-verbal intelligence, autism severity, or the presence of co-occurring alexithymia or ADHD.