Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable

OpenAIRE

Wilmer, Jeremy B.; Germine, Laura; Chabris, Christopher F.; Chatterjee, Garga; Williams, Mark; Loken, Eric; Nakayama, Ken; Duchaine, Bradley

2010-01-01

Compared with notable successes in the genetics of basic sensory transduction, progress on the genetics of higher level perception and cognition has been limited. We propose that investigating specific cognitive abilities with well-defined neural substrates, such as face recognition, may yield additional insights. In a twin study of face recognition, we found that the correlation of scores between monozygotic twins (0.70) was more than double the dizygotic twin correlation (0.29), evidence fo...

Unconscious processing of facial attractiveness: invisible attractive faces orient visual attention.

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Hung, Shao-Min; Nieh, Chih-Hsuan; Hsieh, Po-Jang

2016-11-16

Past research has proven human's extraordinary ability to extract information from a face in the blink of an eye, including its emotion, gaze direction, and attractiveness. However, it remains elusive whether facial attractiveness can be processed and influences our behaviors in the complete absence of conscious awareness. Here we demonstrate unconscious processing of facial attractiveness with three distinct approaches. In Experiment 1, the time taken for faces to break interocular suppression was measured. The results showed that attractive faces enjoyed the privilege of breaking suppression and reaching consciousness earlier. In Experiment 2, we further showed that attractive faces had lower visibility thresholds, again suggesting that facial attractiveness could be processed more easily to reach consciousness. Crucially, in Experiment 3, a significant decrease of accuracy on an orientation discrimination task subsequent to an invisible attractive face showed that attractive faces, albeit suppressed and invisible, still exerted an effect by orienting attention. Taken together, for the first time, we show that facial attractiveness can be processed in the complete absence of consciousness, and an unconscious attractive face is still capable of directing our attention.

Dissociated neural basis of two behavioral hallmarks of holistic face processing: The whole-part effect and composite-face effect.

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Li, Jin; Huang, Lijie; Song, Yiying; Liu, Jia

2017-07-28

It has been long proposed that our extraordinary face recognition ability stems from holistic face processing. Two widely-used behavioral hallmarks of holistic face processing are the whole-part effect (WPE) and composite-face effect (CFE). However, it remains unknown whether these two effects reflect similar or different aspects of holistic face processing. Here we investigated this question by examining whether the WPE and CFE involved shared or distinct neural substrates in a large sample of participants (N=200). We found that the WPE and CFE showed hemispheric dissociation in the fusiform face area (FFA), that is, the WPE was correlated with face selectivity in the left FFA, while the CFE was correlated with face selectivity in the right FFA. Further, the correlation between the WPE and face selectivity was largely driven by the FFA response to faces, whereas the association between the CFE and face selectivity resulted from suppressed response to objects in the right FFA. Finally, we also observed dissociated correlation patterns of the WPE and CFE in other face-selective regions and across the whole brain. These results suggest that the WPE and CFE may reflect different aspects of holistic face processing, which shed new light on the behavioral dissociations of these two effects demonstrated in literature. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Capturing specific abilities as a window into human individuality: the example of face recognition.

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Wilmer, Jeremy B; Germine, Laura; Chabris, Christopher F; Chatterjee, Garga; Gerbasi, Margaret; Nakayama, Ken

2012-01-01

Proper characterization of each individual's unique pattern of strengths and weaknesses requires good measures of diverse abilities. Here, we advocate combining our growing understanding of neural and cognitive mechanisms with modern psychometric methods in a renewed effort to capture human individuality through a consideration of specific abilities. We articulate five criteria for the isolation and measurement of specific abilities, then apply these criteria to face recognition. We cleanly dissociate face recognition from more general visual and verbal recognition. This dissociation stretches across ability as well as disability, suggesting that specific developmental face recognition deficits are a special case of a broader specificity that spans the entire spectrum of human face recognition performance. Item-by-item results from 1,471 web-tested participants, included as supplementary information, fuel item analyses, validation, norming, and item response theory (IRT) analyses of our three tests: (a) the widely used Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT); (b) an Abstract Art Memory Test (AAMT), and (c) a Verbal Paired-Associates Memory Test (VPMT). The availability of this data set provides a solid foundation for interpreting future scores on these tests. We argue that the allied fields of experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and vision science could fuel the discovery of additional specific abilities to add to face recognition, thereby providing new perspectives on human individuality.

Deficient cortical face-sensitive N170 responses and basic visual processing in schizophrenia.

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Maher, S; Mashhoon, Y; Ekstrom, T; Lukas, S; Chen, Y

2016-01-01

Face detection, an ability to identify a visual stimulus as a face, is impaired in patients with schizophrenia. It is unclear whether impaired face processing in this psychiatric disorder results from face-specific domains or stems from more basic visual domains. In this study, we examined cortical face-sensitive N170 response in schizophrenia, taking into account deficient basic visual contrast processing. We equalized visual contrast signals among patients (n=20) and controls (n=20) and between face and tree images, based on their individual perceptual capacities (determined using psychophysical methods). We measured N170, a putative temporal marker of face processing, during face detection and tree detection. In controls, N170 amplitudes were significantly greater for faces than trees across all three visual contrast levels tested (perceptual threshold, two times perceptual threshold and 100%). In patients, however, N170 amplitudes did not differ between faces and trees, indicating diminished face selectivity (indexed by the differential responses to face vs. tree). These results indicate a lack of face-selectivity in temporal responses of brain machinery putatively responsible for face processing in schizophrenia. This neuroimaging finding suggests that face-specific processing is compromised in this psychiatric disorder. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Face validity of the single work ability item

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Gupta, Nidhi; Jensen, Bjørn Søvsø; Søgaard, Karen

2014-01-01

with a total of 5,810 h, including 2,640 working hours. RESULTS: A significant moderate correlation between work ability and %HRR was observed among males (R = -0.33, P = 0.005), but not among females (R = 0.11, P = 0.431). In a gender-stratified multi-adjusted logistic regression analysis, males with high...... %HRR were more likely to report a reduced work ability compared to males with low %HRR [OR = 4.75, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) = 1.31 to 17.25]. However, this association was not found among females (OR = 0.26, 95% CI 0.03 to 2.16), and a significant interaction between work ability, %HRR......PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate the face validity of the self-reported single item work ability with objectively measured heart rate reserve (%HRR) among blue-collar workers. METHODS: We utilized data from 127 blue-collar workers (Female = 53; Male = 74) aged 18-65 years from...

Arguments Against a Configural Processing Account of Familiar Face Recognition.

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Burton, A Mike; Schweinberger, Stefan R; Jenkins, Rob; Kaufmann, Jürgen M

2015-07-01

Face recognition is a remarkable human ability, which underlies a great deal of people's social behavior. Individuals can recognize family members, friends, and acquaintances over a very large range of conditions, and yet the processes by which they do this remain poorly understood, despite decades of research. Although a detailed understanding remains elusive, face recognition is widely thought to rely on configural processing, specifically an analysis of spatial relations between facial features (so-called second-order configurations). In this article, we challenge this traditional view, raising four problems: (1) configural theories are underspecified; (2) large configural changes leave recognition unharmed; (3) recognition is harmed by nonconfigural changes; and (4) in separate analyses of face shape and face texture, identification tends to be dominated by texture. We review evidence from a variety of sources and suggest that failure to acknowledge the impact of familiarity on facial representations may have led to an overgeneralization of the configural account. We argue instead that second-order configural information is remarkably unimportant for familiar face recognition. © The Author(s) 2015.

Interference among the Processing of Facial Emotion, Face Race, and Face Gender

OpenAIRE

Li, Yongna; Tse, Chi-Shing

2016-01-01

People are able to simultaneously process multiple dimensions of facial properties. Facial processing models are based on the processing of facial properties. This paper examined the processing of facial emotion, face race and face gender using categorization tasks. The same set of Chinese, White and Black faces, each posing a neutral, happy or angry expression, was used in three experiments. Facial emotion interfered with face race in all the tasks. The interaction of face race and face gend...

Dissociable roles of internal feelings and face recognition ability in facial expression decoding.

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Zhang, Lin; Song, Yiying; Liu, Ling; Liu, Jia

2016-05-15

The problem of emotion recognition has been tackled by researchers in both affective computing and cognitive neuroscience. While affective computing relies on analyzing visual features from facial expressions, it has been proposed that humans recognize emotions by internally simulating the emotional states conveyed by others' expressions, in addition to perceptual analysis of facial features. Here we investigated whether and how our internal feelings contributed to the ability to decode facial expressions. In two independent large samples of participants, we observed that individuals who generally experienced richer internal feelings exhibited a higher ability to decode facial expressions, and the contribution of internal feelings was independent of face recognition ability. Further, using voxel-based morphometry, we found that the gray matter volume (GMV) of bilateral superior temporal sulcus (STS) and the right inferior parietal lobule was associated with facial expression decoding through the mediating effect of internal feelings, while the GMV of bilateral STS, precuneus, and the right central opercular cortex contributed to facial expression decoding through the mediating effect of face recognition ability. In addition, the clusters in bilateral STS involved in the two components were neighboring yet separate. Our results may provide clues about the mechanism by which internal feelings, in addition to face recognition ability, serve as an important instrument for humans in facial expression decoding. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Interference among the Processing of Facial Emotion, Face Race, and Face Gender

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Yongna; Tse, Chi-Shing

2016-01-01

People can process multiple dimensions of facial properties simultaneously. Facial processing models are based on the processing of facial properties. The current study examined the processing of facial emotion, face race, and face gender using categorization tasks. The same set of Chinese, White and Black faces, each posing a neutral, happy or angry expression, was used in three experiments. Facial emotion interacted with face race in all the tasks. The interaction of face race and face gender was found in the race and gender categorization tasks, whereas the interaction of facial emotion and face gender was significant in the emotion and gender categorization tasks. These results provided evidence for a symmetric interaction between variant facial properties (emotion) and invariant facial properties (race and gender). PMID:27840621

Interference among the Processing of Facial Emotion, Face Race, and Face Gender.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Yongna; Tse, Chi-Shing

2016-01-01

People can process multiple dimensions of facial properties simultaneously. Facial processing models are based on the processing of facial properties. The current study examined the processing of facial emotion, face race, and face gender using categorization tasks. The same set of Chinese, White and Black faces, each posing a neutral, happy or angry expression, was used in three experiments. Facial emotion interacted with face race in all the tasks. The interaction of face race and face gender was found in the race and gender categorization tasks, whereas the interaction of facial emotion and face gender was significant in the emotion and gender categorization tasks. These results provided evidence for a symmetric interaction between variant facial properties (emotion) and invariant facial properties (race and gender).

Looking at My Own Face: Visual Processing Strategies in Self–Other Face Recognition

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Anya Chakraborty

2018-02-01

Full Text Available We live in an age of ‘selfies.’ Yet, how we look at our own faces has seldom been systematically investigated. In this study we test if the visual processing of the highly familiar self-face is different from other faces, using psychophysics and eye-tracking. This paradigm also enabled us to test the association between the psychophysical properties of self-face representation and visual processing strategies involved in self-face recognition. Thirty-three adults performed a self-face recognition task from a series of self-other face morphs with simultaneous eye-tracking. Participants were found to look longer at the lower part of the face for self-face compared to other-face. Participants with a more distinct self-face representation, as indexed by a steeper slope of the psychometric response curve for self-face recognition, were found to look longer at upper part of the faces identified as ‘self’ vs. those identified as ‘other’. This result indicates that self-face representation can influence where we look when we process our own vs. others’ faces. We also investigated the association of autism-related traits with self-face processing metrics since autism has previously been associated with atypical self-processing. The study did not find any self-face specific association with autistic traits, suggesting that autism-related features may be related to self-processing in a domain specific manner.

Face Engagement during Infancy Predicts Later Face Recognition Ability in Younger Siblings of Children with Autism

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de Klerk, Carina C. J. M.; Gliga, Teodora; Charman, Tony; Johnson, Mark H.

2014-01-01

Face recognition difficulties are frequently documented in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). It has been hypothesized that these difficulties result from a reduced interest in faces early in life, leading to decreased cortical specialization and atypical development of the neural circuitry for face processing. However, a recent study…

Face and emotion expression processing and the serotonin transporter polymorphism 5-HTTLPR/rs22531.

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Hildebrandt, A; Kiy, A; Reuter, M; Sommer, W; Wilhelm, O

2016-06-01

Face cognition, including face identity and facial expression processing, is a crucial component of socio-emotional abilities, characterizing humans as highest developed social beings. However, for these trait domains molecular genetic studies investigating gene-behavior associations based on well-founded phenotype definitions are still rare. We examined the relationship between 5-HTTLPR/rs25531 polymorphisms - related to serotonin-reuptake - and the ability to perceive and recognize faces and emotional expressions in human faces. For this aim we conducted structural equation modeling on data from 230 young adults, obtained by using a comprehensive, multivariate task battery with maximal effort tasks. By additionally modeling fluid intelligence and immediate and delayed memory factors, we aimed to address the discriminant relationships of the 5-HTTLPR/rs25531 polymorphisms with socio-emotional abilities. We found a robust association between the 5-HTTLPR/rs25531 polymorphism and facial emotion perception. Carriers of two long (L) alleles outperformed carriers of one or two S alleles. Weaker associations were present for face identity perception and memory for emotional facial expressions. There was no association between the 5-HTTLPR/rs25531 polymorphism and non-social abilities, demonstrating discriminant validity of the relationships. We discuss the implications and possible neural mechanisms underlying these novel findings. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society.

Disrupted neural processing of emotional faces in psychopathy.

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Contreras-Rodríguez, Oren; Pujol, Jesus; Batalla, Iolanda; Harrison, Ben J; Bosque, Javier; Ibern-Regàs, Immaculada; Hernández-Ribas, Rosa; Soriano-Mas, Carles; Deus, Joan; López-Solà, Marina; Pifarré, Josep; Menchón, José M; Cardoner, Narcís

2014-04-01

Psychopaths show a reduced ability to recognize emotion facial expressions, which may disturb the interpersonal relationship development and successful social adaptation. Behavioral hypotheses point toward an association between emotion recognition deficits in psychopathy and amygdala dysfunction. Our prediction was that amygdala dysfunction would combine deficient activation with disturbances in functional connectivity with cortical regions of the face-processing network. Twenty-two psychopaths and 22 control subjects were assessed and functional magnetic resonance maps were generated to identify both brain activation and task-induced functional connectivity using psychophysiological interaction analysis during an emotional face-matching task. Results showed significant amygdala activation in control subjects only, but differences between study groups did not reach statistical significance. In contrast, psychopaths showed significantly increased activation in visual and prefrontal areas, with this latest activation being associated with psychopaths' affective-interpersonal disturbances. Psychophysiological interaction analyses revealed a reciprocal reduction in functional connectivity between the left amygdala and visual and prefrontal cortices. Our results suggest that emotional stimulation may evoke a relevant cortical response in psychopaths, but a disruption in the processing of emotional faces exists involving the reciprocal functional interaction between the amygdala and neocortex, consistent with the notion of a failure to integrate emotion into cognition in psychopathic individuals.

Holistic processing of face configurations and components.

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Hayward, William G; Crookes, Kate; Chu, Ming Hon; Favelle, Simone K; Rhodes, Gillian

2016-10-01

Although many researchers agree that faces are processed holistically, we know relatively little about what information holistic processing captures from a face. Most studies that assess the nature of holistic processing do so with changes to the face affecting many different aspects of face information (e.g., different identities). Does holistic processing affect every aspect of a face? We used the composite task, a common means of examining the strength of holistic processing, with participants making same-different judgments about configuration changes or component changes to 1 portion of a face. Configuration changes involved changes in spatial position of the eyes, whereas component changes involved lightening or darkening the eyebrows. Composites were either aligned or misaligned, and were presented either upright or inverted. Both configuration judgments and component judgments showed evidence of holistic processing, and in both cases it was strongest for upright face composites. These results suggest that holistic processing captures a broad range of information about the face, including both configuration-based and component-based information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Structural encoding processes contribute to individual differences in face and object cognition: Inferences from psychometric test performance and event-related brain potentials.

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Nowparast Rostami, Hadiseh; Sommer, Werner; Zhou, Changsong; Wilhelm, Oliver; Hildebrandt, Andrea

2017-10-01

The enhanced N1 component in event-related potentials (ERP) to face stimuli, termed N170, is considered to indicate the structural encoding of faces. Previously, individual differences in the latency of the N170 have been related to face and object cognition abilities. By orthogonally manipulating content domain (faces vs objects) and task demands (easy/speed vs difficult/accuracy) in both psychometric and EEG tasks, we investigated the uniqueness of the processes underlying face cognition as compared with object cognition and the extent to which the N1/N170 component can explain individual differences in face and object cognition abilities. Data were recorded from N = 198 healthy young adults. Structural equation modeling (SEM) confirmed that the accuracies of face perception (FP) and memory are specific abilities above general object cognition; in contrast, the speed of face processing was not differentiable from the speed of object cognition. Although there was considerable domain-general variance in the N170 shared with the N1, there was significant face-specific variance in the N170. The brain-behavior relationship showed that faster face-specific processes for structural encoding of faces are associated with higher accuracy in both perceiving and memorizing faces. Moreover, in difficult task conditions, qualitatively different processes are additionally needed for recognizing face and object stimuli as compared with easy tasks. The difficulty-dependent variance components in the N170 amplitude were related with both face and object memory (OM) performance. We discuss implications for understanding individual differences in face cognition. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Young Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder Show Early Atypical Neural Activity during Emotional Face Processing

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Rachel C. Leung

2018-02-01

Full Text Available Social cognition is impaired in autism spectrum disorder (ASD. The ability to perceive and interpret affect is integral to successful social functioning and has an extended developmental course. However, the neural mechanisms underlying emotional face processing in ASD are unclear. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG, the present study explored neural activation during implicit emotional face processing in young adults with and without ASD. Twenty-six young adults with ASD and 26 healthy controls were recruited. Participants indicated the location of a scrambled pattern (target that was presented alongside a happy or angry face. Emotion-related activation sources for each emotion were estimated using the Empirical Bayes Beamformer (pcorr ≤ 0.001 in Statistical Parametric Mapping 12 (SPM12. Emotional faces elicited elevated fusiform, amygdala and anterior insula and reduced anterior cingulate cortex (ACC activity in adults with ASD relative to controls. Within group comparisons revealed that angry vs. happy faces elicited distinct neural activity in typically developing adults; there was no distinction in young adults with ASD. Our data suggest difficulties in affect processing in ASD reflect atypical recruitment of traditional emotional processing areas. These early differences may contribute to difficulties in deriving social reward from faces, ascribing salience to faces, and an immature threat processing system, which collectively could result in deficits in emotional face processing.

Face Recognition and Description Abilities in People with Mild Intellectual Disabilities

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Gawrylowicz, Julie; Gabbert, Fiona; Carson, Derek; Lindsay, William R.; Hancock, Peter J. B.

2013-01-01

Background: People with intellectual disabilities (ID) are as likely as the general population to find themselves in the situation of having to identify and/or describe a perpetrator's face to the police. However, limited verbal and memory abilities in people with ID might prevent them to engage in standard police procedures. Method: Two…

Increased fusiform area activation in schizophrenia during processing of spatial frequency-degraded faces, as revealed by fMRI.

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Silverstein, S M; All, S D; Kasi, R; Berten, S; Essex, B; Lathrop, K L; Little, D M

2010-07-01

People with schizophrenia demonstrate perceptual organization impairments, and these are thought to contribute to their face processing difficulties. We examined the neural substrates of emotionally neutral face processing in schizophrenia by investigating neural activity under three stimulus conditions: faces characterized by the full spectrum of spatial frequencies, faces with low spatial frequency information removed [high spatial frequency (HSF) condition], and faces with high spatial frequency information removed [low spatial frequency (LSF) condition]. Face perception in the HSF condition is more reliant on local feature processing whereas perception in the LSF condition requires greater reliance on global form processing. Past studies of perceptual organization in schizophrenia indicate that patients perform relatively more poorly with degraded stimuli but also that, when global information is absent, patients may perform better than controls because of their relatively increased ability to initially process individual features. Therefore, we hypothesized that people with schizophrenia (n=14) would demonstrate greater face processing difficulties than controls (n=13) in the LSF condition, whereas they would demonstrate a smaller difference or superior performance in the HSF condition. In a gender-discrimination task, behavioral data indicated high levels of accuracy for both groups, with a trend toward an interaction involving higher patient performance in the HSF condition and poorer patient performance in the LSF condition. Patients demonstrated greater activity in the fusiform gyrus compared to controls in both degraded conditions. These data suggest that impairments in basic integration abilities may be compensated for by relatively increased activity in this region.

A Shape-Based Account for Holistic Face Processing

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Zhao, Mintao; Bülthoff, Heinrich H.; Bülthoff, Isabelle

2016-01-01

Faces are processed holistically, so selective attention to 1 face part without any influence of the others often fails. In this study, 3 experiments investigated what type of facial information (shape or surface) underlies holistic face processing and whether generalization of holistic processing to nonexperienced faces requires extensive…

Can Individuals with Autism Abstract Prototypes of Natural Faces?

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Gastgeb, Holly Zajac; Wilkinson, Desiree A.; Minshew, Nancy J.; Strauss, Mark S.

2011-01-01

There is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that individuals with autism have difficulty with face processing. One basic cognitive ability that may underlie face processing difficulties is the ability to abstract a prototype. The current study examined prototype formation with natural faces using eye-tracking in high-functioning adults with…

Information Processing and Human Abilities

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Kirby, John R.; Das, J. P.

1978-01-01

The simultaneous and successive processing model of cognitive abilities was compared to a traditional primary mental abilities model. Simultaneous processing was found to be primarily related to spatial ability; and to a lesser extent, to memory and inductive reasoning. Subjects were 104 fourth-grade urban males. (Author/GD C)

Normal composite face effects in developmental prosopagnosia.

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Biotti, Federica; Wu, Esther; Yang, Hua; Jiahui, Guo; Duchaine, Bradley; Cook, Richard

2017-10-01

Upright face perception is thought to involve holistic processing, whereby local features are integrated into a unified whole. Consistent with this view, the top half of one face appears to fuse perceptually with the bottom half of another, when aligned spatially and presented upright. This 'composite face effect' reveals a tendency to integrate information from disparate regions when faces are presented canonically. In recent years, the relationship between susceptibility to the composite effect and face recognition ability has received extensive attention both in participants with normal face recognition and participants with developmental prosopagnosia. Previous results suggest that individuals with developmental prosopagnosia may show reduced susceptibility to the effect suggestive of diminished holistic face processing. Here we describe two studies that examine whether developmental prosopagnosia is associated with reduced composite face effects. Despite using independent samples of developmental prosopagnosics and different composite procedures, we find no evidence for reduced composite face effects. The experiments yielded similar results; highly significant composite effects in both prosopagnosic groups that were similar in magnitude to the effects found in participants with normal face processing. The composite face effects exhibited by both samples and the controls were greatly diminished when stimulus arrangements were inverted. Our finding that the whole-face binding process indexed by the composite effect is intact in developmental prosopagnosia indicates that other factors are responsible for developmental prosopagnosia. These results are also inconsistent with suggestions that susceptibility to the composite face effect and face recognition ability are tightly linked. While the holistic process revealed by the composite face effect may be necessary for typical face perception, it is not sufficient; individual differences in face recognition ability

Holistic processing for other-race faces in chinese participants occurs for upright but not inverted faces.

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Crookes, Kate; Favelle, Simone; Hayward, William G

2013-01-01

Recent evidence suggests stronger holistic processing for own-race faces may underlie the own-race advantage in face memory. In previous studies Caucasian participants have demonstrated larger holistic processing effects for Caucasian over Asian faces. However, Asian participants have consistently shown similar sized effects for both Asian and Caucasian faces. We investigated two proposed explanations for the holistic processing of other-race faces by Asian participants: (1) greater other-race exposure, (2) a general global processing bias. Holistic processing was tested using the part-whole task. Participants were living in predominantly own-race environments and other-race contact was evaluated. Despite reporting significantly greater contact with own-race than other-race people, Chinese participants displayed strong holistic processing for both Asian and Caucasian upright faces. In addition, Chinese participants showed no evidence of holistic processing for inverted faces arguing against a general global processing bias explanation. Caucasian participants, in line with previous studies, displayed stronger holistic processing for Caucasian than Asian upright faces. For inverted faces there were no race-of-face differences. These results are used to suggest that Asians may make more general use of face-specific mechanisms than Caucasians.

A specialized face-processing model inspired by the organization of monkey face patches explains several face-specific phenomena observed in humans.

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Farzmahdi, Amirhossein; Rajaei, Karim; Ghodrati, Masoud; Ebrahimpour, Reza; Khaligh-Razavi, Seyed-Mahdi

2016-04-26

Converging reports indicate that face images are processed through specialized neural networks in the brain -i.e. face patches in monkeys and the fusiform face area (FFA) in humans. These studies were designed to find out how faces are processed in visual system compared to other objects. Yet, the underlying mechanism of face processing is not completely revealed. Here, we show that a hierarchical computational model, inspired by electrophysiological evidence on face processing in primates, is able to generate representational properties similar to those observed in monkey face patches (posterior, middle and anterior patches). Since the most important goal of sensory neuroscience is linking the neural responses with behavioral outputs, we test whether the proposed model, which is designed to account for neural responses in monkey face patches, is also able to predict well-documented behavioral face phenomena observed in humans. We show that the proposed model satisfies several cognitive face effects such as: composite face effect and the idea of canonical face views. Our model provides insights about the underlying computations that transfer visual information from posterior to anterior face patches.

The time course of face processing: startle eyeblink response modulation by face gender and expression.

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Duval, Elizabeth R; Lovelace, Christopher T; Aarant, Justin; Filion, Diane L

2013-12-01

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of both facial expression and face gender on startle eyeblink response patterns at varying lead intervals (300, 800, and 3500ms) indicative of attentional and emotional processes. We aimed to determine whether responses to affective faces map onto the Defense Cascade Model (Lang et al., 1997) to better understand the stages of processing during affective face viewing. At 300ms, there was an interaction between face expression and face gender with female happy and neutral faces and male angry faces producing inhibited startle. At 3500ms, there was a trend for facilitated startle during angry compared to neutral faces. These findings suggest that affective expressions are perceived differently in male and female faces, especially at short lead intervals. Future studies investigating face processing should take both face gender and expression into account. © 2013.

Face processing is gated by visual spatial attention

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Roy E Crist

2008-03-01

Full Text Available Human perception of faces is widely believed to rely on automatic processing by a domain-specifi c, modular component of the visual system. Scalp-recorded event-related potential (ERP recordings indicate that faces receive special stimulus processing at around 170 ms poststimulus onset, in that faces evoke an enhanced occipital negative wave, known as the N170, relative to the activity elicited by other visual objects. As predicted by modular accounts of face processing, this early face-specifi c N170 enhancement has been reported to be largely immune to the infl uence of endogenous processes such as task strategy or attention. However, most studies examining the infl uence of attention on face processing have focused on non-spatial attention, such as object-based attention, which tend to have longer-latency effects. In contrast, numerous studies have demonstrated that visual spatial attention can modulate the processing of visual stimuli as early as 80 ms poststimulus – substantially earlier than the N170. These temporal characteristics raise the question of whether this initial face-specifi c processing is immune to the infl uence of spatial attention. This question was addressed in a dual-visualstream ERP study in which the infl uence of spatial attention on the face-specifi c N170 could be directly examined. As expected, early visual sensory responses to all stimuli presented in an attended location were larger than responses evoked by those same stimuli when presented in an unattended location. More importantly, a signifi cant face-specifi c N170 effect was elicited by faces that appeared in an attended location, but not in an unattended one. In summary, early face-specifi c processing is not automatic, but rather, like other objects, strongly depends on endogenous factors such as the allocation of spatial attention. Moreover, these fi ndings underscore the extensive infl uence that top-down attention exercises over the processing of

Neural markers of opposite-sex bias in face processing

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Alice Mado eProverbio

2010-10-01

Full Text Available Some behavioral and neuroimaging studies suggest that adults prefer to view attractive faces of the opposite sex more than attractive faces of the same sex. However, unlike the other-race face effect (ORE; Caldara et al., 2004, little is known regarding the existence of an opposite-/same-sex bias in face processing. In this study, the faces of 130 attractive male and female adults were foveally presented to 40 heterosexual university students (20 men and 20 women who were engaged in a secondary perceptual task (landscape detection. The automatic processing of face gender was investigated by recording ERPs from 128 scalp sites. Neural markers of opposite- vs. same-sex bias in face processing included larger and earlier centro-parietal N400s in response to faces of the opposite sex and a larger late positivity (LP to same-sex faces. Analysis of intra-cortical neural generators (swLORETA showed that facial processing-related (FG, BA37, BA20/21 and emotion-related brain areas (the right parahippocampal gyrus, BA35; uncus, BA36/38; and the cingulate gyrus, BA24 had higher activations in response to opposite- than same-sex faces. The results of this analysis, along with data obtained from ERP recordings, support the hypothesis that both genders process opposite-sex faces differently than same-sex faces. The data also suggest a hemispheric asymmetry in the processing of opposite-/same-sex faces, with the right hemisphere involved in processing same-sex faces and the left hemisphere involved in processing faces of the opposite sex. The data support previous literature suggesting a right lateralization for the representation of self-image and body awareness.

Neural markers of opposite-sex bias in face processing.

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Proverbio, Alice Mado; Riva, Federica; Martin, Eleonora; Zani, Alberto

2010-01-01

Some behavioral and neuroimaging studies suggest that adults prefer to view attractive faces of the opposite sex more than attractive faces of the same sex. However, unlike the other-race face effect (Caldara et al., 2004), little is known regarding the existence of an opposite-/same-sex bias in face processing. In this study, the faces of 130 attractive male and female adults were foveally presented to 40 heterosexual university students (20 men and 20 women) who were engaged in a secondary perceptual task (landscape detection). The automatic processing of face gender was investigated by recording ERPs from 128 scalp sites. Neural markers of opposite- vs. same-sex bias in face processing included larger and earlier centro-parietal N400s in response to faces of the opposite sex and a larger late positivity (LP) to same-sex faces. Analysis of intra-cortical neural generators (swLORETA) showed that facial processing-related (FG, BA37, BA20/21) and emotion-related brain areas (the right parahippocampal gyrus, BA35; uncus, BA36/38; and the cingulate gyrus, BA24) had higher activations in response to opposite- than same-sex faces. The results of this analysis, along with data obtained from ERP recordings, support the hypothesis that both genders process opposite-sex faces differently than same-sex faces. The data also suggest a hemispheric asymmetry in the processing of opposite-/same-sex faces, with the right hemisphere involved in processing same-sex faces and the left hemisphere involved in processing faces of the opposite sex. The data support previous literature suggesting a right lateralization for the representation of self-image and body awareness.

Neural processing of high and low spatial frequency information in faces changes across development: qualitative changes in face processing during adolescence.

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Peters, Judith C; Vlamings, Petra; Kemner, Chantal

2013-05-01

Face perception in adults depends on skilled processing of interattribute distances ('configural' processing), which is disrupted for faces presented in inverted orientation (face inversion effect or FIE). Children are not proficient in configural processing, and this might relate to an underlying immaturity to use facial information in low spatial frequency (SF) ranges, which capture the coarse information needed for configural processing. We hypothesized that during adolescence a shift from use of high to low SF information takes place. Therefore, we studied the influence of SF content on neural face processing in groups of children (9-10 years), adolescents (14-15 years) and young adults (21-29 years) by measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) to upright and inverted faces which varied in SF content. Results revealed that children show a neural FIE in early processing stages (i.e. P1; generated in early visual areas), suggesting a superficial, global facial analysis. In contrast, ERPs of adults revealed an FIE at later processing stages (i.e. N170; generated in face-selective, higher visual areas). Interestingly, adolescents showed FIEs in both processing stages, suggesting a hybrid developmental stage. Furthermore, adolescents and adults showed FIEs for stimuli containing low SF information, whereas such effects were driven by both low and high SF information in children. These results indicate that face processing has a protracted maturational course into adolescence, and is dependent on changes in SF processing. During adolescence, sensitivity to configural cues is developed, which aids the fast and holistic processing that is so special for faces. © 2013 Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Are reading and face processing related?

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Starrfelt, Randi; Klargaard, Solja K.; Petersen, Anders

Traditionally, perceptual processing of faces and words is considered highly specialized, strongly lateralized, and largely independent. This has, however, recently been challenged by studies showing that learning to read may affect the perceptual and neural processes involved in face recognition......, reflected in better overall accuracy, a lower perceptual threshold, and higher processing speed for words compared to letters. In sum, we find no evidence that reading skills are abnormal in developmental prosopagnosia, a finding that may challenge the recently proposed hypothesis that reading development...

Passive and motivated perception of emotional faces: qualitative and quantitative changes in the face processing network.

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Laurie R Skelly

Full Text Available Emotionally expressive faces are processed by a distributed network of interacting sub-cortical and cortical brain regions. The components of this network have been identified and described in large part by the stimulus properties to which they are sensitive, but as face processing research matures interest has broadened to also probe dynamic interactions between these regions and top-down influences such as task demand and context. While some research has tested the robustness of affective face processing by restricting available attentional resources, it is not known whether face network processing can be augmented by increased motivation to attend to affective face stimuli. Short videos of people expressing emotions were presented to healthy participants during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Motivation to attend to the videos was manipulated by providing an incentive for improved recall performance. During the motivated condition, there was greater coherence among nodes of the face processing network, more widespread correlation between signal intensity and performance, and selective signal increases in a task-relevant subset of face processing regions, including the posterior superior temporal sulcus and right amygdala. In addition, an unexpected task-related laterality effect was seen in the amygdala. These findings provide strong evidence that motivation augments co-activity among nodes of the face processing network and the impact of neural activity on performance. These within-subject effects highlight the necessity to consider motivation when interpreting neural function in special populations, and to further explore the effect of task demands on face processing in healthy brains.

Neurophysiological evidence (ERPs) for hemispheric processing of facial expressions of emotions: Evidence from whole face and chimeric face stimuli.

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Damaskinou, Nikoleta; Watling, Dawn

2018-05-01

This study was designed to investigate the patterns of electrophysiological responses of early emotional processing at frontocentral sites in adults and to explore whether adults' activation patterns show hemispheric lateralization for facial emotion processing. Thirty-five adults viewed full face and chimeric face stimuli. After viewing two faces, sequentially, participants were asked to decide which of the two faces was more emotive. The findings from the standard faces and the chimeric faces suggest that emotion processing is present during the early phases of face processing in the frontocentral sites. In particular, sad emotional faces are processed differently than neutral and happy (including happy chimeras) faces in these early phases of processing. Further, there were differences in the electrode amplitudes over the left and right hemisphere, particularly in the early temporal window. This research provides supporting evidence that the chimeric face test is a test of emotion processing that elicits right hemispheric processing.

Horizontal information drives the behavioural signatures of face processing

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Valerie Goffaux

2010-09-01

Full Text Available Recent psychophysical evidence indicates that the vertical arrangement of horizontal information is particularly important for encoding facial identity. In this paper we extend this notion to examine the role that information at different (particularly cardinal orientations might play in a number of established phenomena each a behavioural “signature” of face processing. In particular we consider (a the face inversion effect (FIE, (b the facial identity after-effect, (c face-matching across viewpoint, and (d interactive, so-called holistic, processing of face parts. We report that filtering faces to remove all but the horizontal information largely preserves these effects but conversely, retaining vertical information generally diminishes or abolishes them. We conclude that preferential processing of horizontal information is a central feature of human face processing that supports many of the behavioural signatures of this critical visual operation.

Holistic Processing of Faces: Perceptual and Decisional Components

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Richler, Jennifer J.; Gauthier, Isabel; Wenger, Michael J.; Palmeri, Thomas J.

2008-01-01

Researchers have used several composite face paradigms to assess holistic processing of faces. In the selective attention paradigm, participants decide whether one face part (e.g., top) is the same as a previously seen face part. Their judgment is affected by whether the irrelevant part of the test face is the same as or different than the…

Impaired processing of self-face recognition in anorexia nervosa.

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Hirot, France; Lesage, Marine; Pedron, Lya; Meyer, Isabelle; Thomas, Pierre; Cottencin, Olivier; Guardia, Dewi

2016-03-01

Body image disturbances and massive weight loss are major clinical symptoms of anorexia nervosa (AN). The aim of the present study was to examine the influence of body changes and eating attitudes on self-face recognition ability in AN. Twenty-seven subjects suffering from AN and 27 control participants performed a self-face recognition task (SFRT). During the task, digital morphs between their own face and a gender-matched unfamiliar face were presented in a random sequence. Participants' self-face recognition failures, cognitive flexibility, body concern and eating habits were assessed with the Self-Face Recognition Questionnaire (SFRQ), Trail Making Test (TMT), Body Shape Questionnaire (BSQ) and Eating Disorder Inventory-2 (EDI-2), respectively. Subjects suffering from AN exhibited significantly greater difficulties than control participants in identifying their own face (p = 0.028). No significant difference was observed between the two groups for TMT (all p > 0.1, non-significant). Regarding predictors of self-face recognition skills, there was a negative correlation between SFRT and body mass index (p = 0.01) and a positive correlation between SFRQ and EDI-2 (p face recognition.

Age Differences in Face Processing: The Role of Perceptual Degradation and Holistic Processing.

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Boutet, Isabelle; Meinhardt-Injac, Bozana

2018-01-24

We simultaneously investigated the role of three hypotheses regarding age-related differences in face processing: perceptual degradation, impaired holistic processing, and an interaction between the two. Young adults (YA) aged 20-33-year olds, middle-age adults (MA) aged 50-64-year olds, and older adults (OA) aged 65-82-year olds were tested on the context congruency paradigm, which allows measurement of face-specific holistic processing across the life span (Meinhardt-Injac, Persike & Meinhardt, 2014. Acta Psychologica, 151, 155-163). Perceptual degradation was examined by measuring performance with faces that were not filtered (FSF), with faces filtered to preserve low spatial frequencies (LSF), and with faces filtered to preserve high spatial frequencies (HSF). We found that reducing perceptual signal strength had a greater impact on MA and OA for HSF faces, but not LSF faces. Context congruency effects were significant and of comparable magnitude across ages for FSF, LSF, and HSF faces. By using watches as control objects, we show that these holistic effects reflect face-specific mechanisms in all age groups. Our results support the perceptual degradation hypothesis for faces containing only HSF and suggest that holistic processing is preserved in aging even under conditions of reduced signal strength. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Gender differences in hemispheric asymmetry for face processing

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Matarazzo Silvia

2006-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Current cognitive neuroscience models predict a right-hemispheric dominance for face processing in humans. However, neuroimaging and electromagnetic data in the literature provide conflicting evidence of a right-sided brain asymmetry for decoding the structural properties of faces. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether this inconsistency might be due to gender differences in hemispheric asymmetry. Results In this study, event-related brain potentials (ERPs were recorded in 40 healthy, strictly right-handed individuals (20 women and 20 men while they observed infants' faces expressing a variety of emotions. Early face-sensitive P1 and N1 responses to neutral vs. affective expressions were measured over the occipital/temporal cortices, and the responses were analyzed according to viewer gender. Along with a strong right hemispheric dominance for men, the results showed a lack of asymmetry for face processing in the amplitude of the occipito-temporal N1 response in women to both neutral and affective faces. Conclusion Men showed an asymmetric functioning of visual cortex while decoding faces and expressions, whereas women showed a more bilateral functioning. These results indicate the importance of gender effects in the lateralization of the occipito-temporal response during the processing of face identity, structure, familiarity, or affective content.

Developmental changes in analytic and holistic processes in face perception.

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Joseph, Jane E; DiBartolo, Michelle D; Bhatt, Ramesh S

2015-01-01

Although infants demonstrate sensitivity to some kinds of perceptual information in faces, many face capacities continue to develop throughout childhood. One debate is the degree to which children perceive faces analytically versus holistically and how these processes undergo developmental change. In the present study, school-aged children and adults performed a perceptual matching task with upright and inverted face and house pairs that varied in similarity of featural or 2(nd) order configural information. Holistic processing was operationalized as the degree of serial processing when discriminating faces and houses [i.e., increased reaction time (RT), as more features or spacing relations were shared between stimuli]. Analytical processing was operationalized as the degree of parallel processing (or no change in RT as a function of greater similarity of features or spatial relations). Adults showed the most evidence for holistic processing (most strongly for 2(nd) order faces) and holistic processing was weaker for inverted faces and houses. Younger children (6-8 years), in contrast, showed analytical processing across all experimental manipulations. Older children (9-11 years) showed an intermediate pattern with a trend toward holistic processing of 2(nd) order faces like adults, but parallel processing in other experimental conditions like younger children. These findings indicate that holistic face representations emerge around 10 years of age. In adults both 2(nd) order and featural information are incorporated into holistic representations, whereas older children only incorporate 2(nd) order information. Holistic processing was not evident in younger children. Hence, the development of holistic face representations relies on 2(nd) order processing initially then incorporates featural information by adulthood.

Developmental changes in analytic and holistic processes in face perception

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Jane Elizabeth Joseph

2015-08-01

Full Text Available Although infants demonstrate sensitivity to some kinds of perceptual information in faces, many face capacities continue to develop throughout childhood. One debate is the degree to which children perceive faces analytically versus holistically and how these processes undergo developmental change. In the present study, school-aged children and adults performed a perceptual matching task with upright and inverted face and house pairs that varied in similarity of featural or 2nd order configural information. Holistic processing was operationalized as the degree of serial processing when discriminating faces and houses (i.e., increased reaction time, RT, as more features or spacing relations were shared between stimuli. Analytical processing was operationalized as the degree of parallel processing (or no change in reaction time as a function of greater similarity of features or spatial relations. Adults showed the most evidence for holistic processing (most strongly for 2nd order faces and holistic processing was weaker for inverted faces and houses. Younger children (6-8 years, in contrast, showed analytical processing across all experimental manipulations. Older children (9-11 years showed an intermediate pattern with a trend toward holistic processing of 2nd order faces like adults, but parallel processing in other experimental conditions like younger children. These findings indicate that holistic face representations emerge around 10 years of age. In adults both 2nd order and featural information are incorporated into holistic representations, whereas older children only incorporate 2nd order information. Holistic processing was not evident in younger children. Hence, the development of holistic face representations relies on 2nd order processing initially then incorporates featural information by adulthood.

Developmental changes in analytic and holistic processes in face perception

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Joseph, Jane E.; DiBartolo, Michelle D.; Bhatt, Ramesh S.

2015-01-01

Although infants demonstrate sensitivity to some kinds of perceptual information in faces, many face capacities continue to develop throughout childhood. One debate is the degree to which children perceive faces analytically versus holistically and how these processes undergo developmental change. In the present study, school-aged children and adults performed a perceptual matching task with upright and inverted face and house pairs that varied in similarity of featural or 2nd order configural information. Holistic processing was operationalized as the degree of serial processing when discriminating faces and houses [i.e., increased reaction time (RT), as more features or spacing relations were shared between stimuli]. Analytical processing was operationalized as the degree of parallel processing (or no change in RT as a function of greater similarity of features or spatial relations). Adults showed the most evidence for holistic processing (most strongly for 2nd order faces) and holistic processing was weaker for inverted faces and houses. Younger children (6–8 years), in contrast, showed analytical processing across all experimental manipulations. Older children (9–11 years) showed an intermediate pattern with a trend toward holistic processing of 2nd order faces like adults, but parallel processing in other experimental conditions like younger children. These findings indicate that holistic face representations emerge around 10 years of age. In adults both 2nd order and featural information are incorporated into holistic representations, whereas older children only incorporate 2nd order information. Holistic processing was not evident in younger children. Hence, the development of holistic face representations relies on 2nd order processing initially then incorporates featural information by adulthood. PMID:26300838

Social and attention-to-detail subclusters of autistic traits differentially predict looking at eyes and face identity recognition ability.

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Davis, Joshua; McKone, Elinor; Zirnsak, Marc; Moore, Tirin; O'Kearney, Richard; Apthorp, Deborah; Palermo, Romina

2017-02-01

This study distinguished between different subclusters of autistic traits in the general population and examined the relationships between these subclusters, looking at the eyes of faces, and the ability to recognize facial identity. Using the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) measure in a university-recruited sample, we separate the social aspects of autistic traits (i.e., those related to communication and social interaction; AQ-Social) from the non-social aspects, particularly attention-to-detail (AQ-Attention). We provide the first evidence that these social and non-social aspects are associated differentially with looking at eyes: While AQ-Social showed the commonly assumed tendency towards reduced looking at eyes, AQ-Attention was associated with increased looking at eyes. We also report that higher attention-to-detail (AQ-Attention) was then indirectly related to improved face recognition, mediated by increased number of fixations to the eyes during face learning. Higher levels of socially relevant autistic traits (AQ-Social) trended in the opposite direction towards being related to poorer face recognition (significantly so in females on the Cambridge Face Memory Test). There was no evidence of any mediated relationship between AQ-Social and face recognition via reduced looking at the eyes. These different effects of AQ-Attention and AQ-Social suggest face-processing studies in Autism Spectrum Disorder might similarly benefit from considering symptom subclusters. Additionally, concerning mechanisms of face recognition, our results support the view that more looking at eyes predicts better face memory. © 2016 The British Psychological Society.

Face memory and face recognition in children and adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: A systematic review.

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Romani, Maria; Vigliante, Miriam; Faedda, Noemi; Rossetti, Serena; Pezzuti, Lina; Guidetti, Vincenzo; Cardona, Francesco

2018-06-01

This review focuses on facial recognition abilities in children and adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). A systematic review, using PRISMA guidelines, was conducted to identify original articles published prior to May 2017 pertaining to memory, face recognition, affect recognition, facial expression recognition and recall of faces in children and adolescents with ADHD. The qualitative synthesis based on different studies shows a particular focus of the research on facial affect recognition without paying similar attention to the structural encoding of facial recognition. In this review, we further investigate facial recognition abilities in children and adolescents with ADHD, providing synthesis of the results observed in the literature, while detecting face recognition tasks used on face processing abilities in ADHD and identifying aspects not yet explored. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Individuating Faces and Common Objects Produces Equal Responses in Putative Face Processing Areas in the Ventral Occipitotemporal Cortex

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Frank Haist

2010-10-01

Full Text Available Controversy surrounds the proposal that specific human cortical regions in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, commonly called the fusiform face area (FFA and occipital face area (OFA, are specialized for face processing. Here, we present findings from a fMRI study of identity discrimination of faces and objects that demonstrates the FFA and OFA are equally responsive to processing stimuli at the level of individuals (i.e., individuation, be they human faces or non-face objects. The FFA and OFA were defined via a passive viewing task as regions that produced greater activation to faces relative to non-face stimuli within the middle fusiform gyrus and inferior occipital gyrus. In the individuation task, participants judged whether sequentially presented images of faces, diverse objects, or wristwatches depicted the identical or a different exemplar. All three stimulus types produced equivalent BOLD activation within the FFA and OFA; that is, there was no face-specific or face-preferential processing. Critically, individuation processing did not eliminate an object superiority effect relative to faces within a region more closely linked to object processing in the lateral occipital complex (LOC, suggesting that individuation processes are reasonably specific to the FFA and OFA. Taken together, these findings challenge the prevailing view that the FFA and OFA are face-specific processing regions, demonstrating instead that they function to individuate -- i.e., identify specific individuals -- within a category. These findings have significant implications for understanding the function of a brain region widely believed to play an important role in social cognition.

Chess masters show a hallmark of face processing with chess.

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Boggan, Amy L; Bartlett, James C; Krawczyk, Daniel C

2012-02-01

Face processing has several distinctive hallmarks that researchers have attributed either to face-specific mechanisms or to extensive experience distinguishing faces. Here, we examined the face-processing hallmark of selective attention failure--as indexed by the congruency effect in the composite paradigm--in a domain of extreme expertise: chess. Among 27 experts, we found that the congruency effect was equally strong with chessboards and faces. Further, comparing these experts with recreational players and novices, we observed a trade-off: Chess expertise was positively related to the congruency effect with chess yet negatively related to the congruency effect with faces. These and other findings reveal a case of expertise-dependent, facelike processing of objects of expertise and suggest that face and expert-chess recognition share common processes.

[Abnormal processing characteristics to basic emotional faces in the early phase in children with autism spectrum disorder].

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Lin, Qiong-Xi; Wu, Gui-Hua; Zhang, Ling; Wang, Zeng-Jian; Pan, Ning; Xu, Cai-Juan; Jing, Jin; Jin, Yu

2018-02-01

To explore the recognition ability and abnormal processing characteristics to basic emotional faces in the early phase in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Photos of Chinese static faces with four basic emotions (fearful, happy, angry and sad) were used as stimulus. Twenty-five ASD children and twenty-two age- and gender-matched typical developed children (normal controls) were asked to match the emotional faces with words. Event-related potential (ERP) data were recorded concurrently. N170 latencies for total emotion and fearful face in the left temporal region were faster than in the right one in normal controls (P<0.05), but the results were not noted in ASD children. Further, N170 latencies in the left temporal region of ASD children were slower than normal controls for total emotion, fearful and happy faces (P<0.05), and their N170 latencies in the right temporal region were prone to slower than normal controls for angry and fearful faces. The holistic perception speed of emotional faces in the early cognitive processing phase in ASD children is slower than normal controls. The lateralized response in the early phase of recognizing emotional faces may be aberrant in children with ASD.

Behavioural and neurophysiological evidence for face identity and face emotion processing in animals

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Tate, Andrew J; Fischer, Hanno; Leigh, Andrea E; Kendrick, Keith M

2006-01-01

Visual cues from faces provide important social information relating to individual identity, sexual attraction and emotional state. Behavioural and neurophysiological studies on both monkeys and sheep have shown that specialized skills and neural systems for processing these complex cues to guide behaviour have evolved in a number of mammals and are not present exclusively in humans. Indeed, there are remarkable similarities in the ways that faces are processed by the brain in humans and other mammalian species. While human studies with brain imaging and gross neurophysiological recording approaches have revealed global aspects of the face-processing network, they cannot investigate how information is encoded by specific neural networks. Single neuron electrophysiological recording approaches in both monkeys and sheep have, however, provided some insights into the neural encoding principles involved and, particularly, the presence of a remarkable degree of high-level encoding even at the level of a specific face. Recent developments that allow simultaneous recordings to be made from many hundreds of individual neurons are also beginning to reveal evidence for global aspects of a population-based code. This review will summarize what we have learned so far from these animal-based studies about the way the mammalian brain processes the faces and the emotions they can communicate, as well as associated capacities such as how identity and emotion cues are dissociated and how face imagery might be generated. It will also try to highlight what questions and advances in knowledge still challenge us in order to provide a complete understanding of just how brain networks perform this complex and important social recognition task. PMID:17118930

Bayesian Face Recognition and Perceptual Narrowing in Face-Space

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Balas, Benjamin

2012-01-01

During the first year of life, infants' face recognition abilities are subject to "perceptual narrowing", the end result of which is that observers lose the ability to distinguish previously discriminable faces (e.g. other-race faces) from one another. Perceptual narrowing has been reported for faces of different species and different races, in…

Laterality Biases to Chimeric Faces in Asperger Syndrome: What Is Right about Face-Processing?

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Ashwin, Chris; Wheelwright, Sally; Baron-Cohen, Simon

2005-01-01

People show a left visual field (LVF) bias for faces, i.e., involving the right hemisphere of the brain. Lesion and neuroimaging studies confirm the importance of the right-hemisphere and suggest separable neural pathways for processing facial identity vs. emotions. We investigated the hemispheric processing of faces in adults with and without…

Face processing pattern under top-down perception: a functional MRI study

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Li, Jun; Liang, Jimin; Tian, Jie; Liu, Jiangang; Zhao, Jizheng; Zhang, Hui; Shi, Guangming

2009-02-01

Although top-down perceptual process plays an important role in face processing, its neural substrate is still puzzling because the top-down stream is extracted difficultly from the activation pattern associated with contamination caused by bottom-up face perception input. In the present study, a novel paradigm of instructing participants to detect faces from pure noise images is employed, which could efficiently eliminate the interference of bottom-up face perception in topdown face processing. Analyzing the map of functional connectivity with right FFA analyzed by conventional Pearson's correlation, a possible face processing pattern induced by top-down perception can be obtained. Apart from the brain areas of bilateral fusiform gyrus (FG), left inferior occipital gyrus (IOG) and left superior temporal sulcus (STS), which are consistent with a core system in the distributed cortical network for face perception, activation induced by top-down face processing is also found in these regions that include the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACC), right oribitofrontal cortex (OFC), left precuneus, right parahippocampal cortex, left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), right frontal pole, bilateral premotor cortex, left inferior parietal cortex and bilateral thalamus. The results indicate that making-decision, attention, episodic memory retrieving and contextual associative processing network cooperate with general face processing regions to process face information under top-down perception.

The special status of sad infant faces: age and valence differences in adults' cortical face processing.

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Colasante, Tyler; Mossad, Sarah I; Dudek, Joanna; Haley, David W

2017-04-01

Understanding the relative and joint prioritization of age- and valence-related face characteristics in adults' cortical face processing remains elusive because these two characteristics have not been manipulated in a single study of neural face processing. We used electroencephalography to investigate adults' P1, N170, P2 and LPP responses to infant and adult faces with happy and sad facial expressions. Viewing infant vs adult faces was associated with significantly larger P1, N170, P2 and LPP responses, with hemisphere and/or participant gender moderating this effect in select cases. Sad faces were associated with significantly larger N170 responses than happy faces. Sad infant faces were associated with significantly larger N170 responses in the right hemisphere than all other combinations of face age and face valence characteristics. We discuss the relative and joint neural prioritization of infant face characteristics and negative facial affect, and their biological value as distinct caregiving and social cues. © The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Validation of the Vanderbilt Holistic Face Processing Test.

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Wang, Chao-Chih; Ross, David A; Gauthier, Isabel; Richler, Jennifer J

2016-01-01

The Vanderbilt Holistic Face Processing Test (VHPT-F) is a new measure of holistic face processing with better psychometric properties relative to prior measures developed for group studies (Richler et al., 2014). In fields where psychologists study individual differences, validation studies are commonplace and the concurrent validity of a new measure is established by comparing it to an older measure with established validity. We follow this approach and test whether the VHPT-F measures the same construct as the composite task, which is group-based measure at the center of the large literature on holistic face processing. In Experiment 1, we found a significant correlation between holistic processing measured in the VHPT-F and the composite task. Although this correlation was small, it was comparable to the correlation between holistic processing measured in the composite task with the same faces, but different target parts (top or bottom), which represents a reasonable upper limit for correlations between the composite task and another measure of holistic processing. These results confirm the validity of the VHPT-F by demonstrating shared variance with another measure of holistic processing based on the same operational definition. These results were replicated in Experiment 2, but only when the demographic profile of our sample matched that of Experiment 1.

Validation of the Vanderbilt Holistic Face Processing Test.

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Chao-Chih Wang

2016-11-01

Full Text Available The Vanderbilt Holistic Face Processing Test (VHPT-F is a new measure of holistic face processing with better psychometric properties relative to prior measures developed for group studies (Richler et al., 2014. In fields where psychologists study individual differences, validation studies are commonplace and the concurrent validity of a new measure is established by comparing it to an older measure with established validity. We follow this approach and test whether the VHPT-F measures the same construct as the composite task, which is group-based measure at the center of the large literature on holistic face processing. In Experiment 1, we found a significant correlation between holistic processing measured in the VHPT-F and the composite task. Although this correlation was small, it was comparable to the correlation between holistic processing measured in the composite task with the same faces, but different target parts (top or bottom, which represents a reasonable upper limit for correlations between the composite task and another measure of holistic processing. These results confirm the validity of the VHPT-F by demonstrating shared variance with another measure of holistic processing based on the same operational definition. These results were replicated in Experiment 2, but only when the demographic profile of our sample matched that of Experiment 1.

The Processing of Human Emotional Faces by Pet and Lab Dogs: Evidence for Lateralization and Experience Effects

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Barber, Anjuli L. A.; Randi, Dania; Müller, Corsin A.; Huber, Ludwig

2016-01-01

From all non-human animals dogs are very likely the best decoders of human behavior. In addition to a high sensitivity to human attentive status and to ostensive cues, they are able to distinguish between individual human faces and even between human facial expressions. However, so far little is known about how they process human faces and to what extent this is influenced by experience. Here we present an eye-tracking study with dogs emanating from two different living environments and varying experience with humans: pet and lab dogs. The dogs were shown pictures of familiar and unfamiliar human faces expressing four different emotions. The results, extracted from several different eye-tracking measurements, revealed pronounced differences in the face processing of pet and lab dogs, thus indicating an influence of the amount of exposure to humans. In addition, there was some evidence for the influences of both, the familiarity and the emotional expression of the face, and strong evidence for a left gaze bias. These findings, together with recent evidence for the dog's ability to discriminate human facial expressions, indicate that dogs are sensitive to some emotions expressed in human faces. PMID:27074009

The neuropsychology of face perception: beyond simple dissociations and functional selectivity.

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Atkinson, Anthony P; Adolphs, Ralph

2011-06-12

Face processing relies on a distributed, patchy network of cortical regions in the temporal and frontal lobes that respond disproportionately to face stimuli, other cortical regions that are not even primarily visual (such as somatosensory cortex), and subcortical structures such as the amygdala. Higher-level face perception abilities, such as judging identity, emotion and trustworthiness, appear to rely on an intact face-processing network that includes the occipital face area (OFA), whereas lower-level face categorization abilities, such as discriminating faces from objects, can be achieved without OFA, perhaps via the direct connections to the fusiform face area (FFA) from several extrastriate cortical areas. Some lesion, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) findings argue against a strict feed-forward hierarchical model of face perception, in which the OFA is the principal and common source of input for other visual and non-visual cortical regions involved in face perception, including the FFA, face-selective superior temporal sulcus and somatosensory cortex. Instead, these findings point to a more interactive model in which higher-level face perception abilities depend on the interplay between several functionally and anatomically distinct neural regions. Furthermore, the nature of these interactions may depend on the particular demands of the task. We review the lesion and TMS literature on this topic and highlight the dynamic and distributed nature of face processing.

The Cambridge Face Memory Test for Children (CFMT-C): a new tool for measuring face recognition skills in childhood.

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Croydon, Abigail; Pimperton, Hannah; Ewing, Louise; Duchaine, Brad C; Pellicano, Elizabeth

2014-09-01

Face recognition ability follows a lengthy developmental course, not reaching maturity until well into adulthood. Valid and reliable assessments of face recognition memory ability are necessary to examine patterns of ability and disability in face processing, yet there is a dearth of such assessments for children. We modified a well-known test of face memory in adults, the Cambridge Face Memory Test (Duchaine & Nakayama, 2006, Neuropsychologia, 44, 576-585), to make it developmentally appropriate for children. To establish its utility, we administered either the upright or inverted versions of the computerised Cambridge Face Memory Test - Children (CFMT-C) to 401 children aged between 5 and 12 years. Our results show that the CFMT-C is sufficiently sensitive to demonstrate age-related gains in the recognition of unfamiliar upright and inverted faces, does not suffer from ceiling or floor effects, generates robust inversion effects, and is capable of detecting difficulties in face memory in children diagnosed with autism. Together, these findings indicate that the CFMT-C constitutes a new valid assessment tool for children's face recognition skills. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A brain network processing the age of faces.

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György A Homola

Full Text Available Age is one of the most salient aspects in faces and of fundamental cognitive and social relevance. Although face processing has been studied extensively, brain regions responsive to age have yet to be localized. Using evocative face morphs and fMRI, we segregate two areas extending beyond the previously established face-sensitive core network, centered on the inferior temporal sulci and angular gyri bilaterally, both of which process changes of facial age. By means of probabilistic tractography, we compare their patterns of functional activation and structural connectivity. The ventral portion of Wernicke's understudied perpendicular association fasciculus is shown to interconnect the two areas, and activation within these clusters is related to the probability of fiber connectivity between them. In addition, post-hoc age-rating competence is found to be associated with high response magnitudes in the left angular gyrus. Our results provide the first evidence that facial age has a distinct representation pattern in the posterior human brain. We propose that particular face-sensitive nodes interact with additional object-unselective quantification modules to obtain individual estimates of facial age. This brain network processing the age of faces differs from the cortical areas that have previously been linked to less developmental but instantly changeable face aspects. Our probabilistic method of associating activations with connectivity patterns reveals an exemplary link that can be used to further study, assess and quantify structure-function relationships.

Processing of emotional faces in social phobia

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Nicole Kristjansen Rosenberg

2011-02-01

Full Text Available Previous research has found that individuals with social phobia differ from controls in their processing of emotional faces. For instance, people with social phobia show increased attention to briefly presented threatening faces. However, when exposure times are increased, the direction of this attentional bias is more unclear. Studies investigating eye movements have found both increased as well as decreased attention to threatening faces in socially anxious participants. The current study investigated eye movements to emotional faces in eight patients with social phobia and 34 controls. Three different tasks with different exposure durations were used, which allowed for an investigation of the time course of attention. At the early time interval, patients showed a complex pattern of both vigilance and avoidance of threatening faces. At the longest time interval, patients avoided the eyes of sad, disgust, and neutral faces more than controls, whereas there were no group differences for angry faces.

Social and emotional relevance in face processing: Happy faces of future interaction partners enhance the LPP

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Florian eBublatzky

2014-07-01

Full Text Available Human face perception is modulated by both emotional valence and social relevance, but their interaction has rarely been examined. Event-related brain potentials (ERP to happy, neutral, and angry facial expressions with different degrees of social relevance were recorded. Social relevance was manipulated by presenting pictures of two specific face actors as future interaction partners (meet condition, whereas two other face actors remained non-relevant. As a further control condition all stimuli were presented without specific task instructions (passive viewing condition. A within-subject design (Facial Expression x Relevance x Task was implemented, where randomly ordered face stimuli of four actors (2 women, from the KDEF were presented for 1s to 26 participants (16 female. Results showed an augmented N170, early posterior negativity (EPN, and late positive potential (LPP for emotional in contrast to neutral facial expressions. Of particular interest, face processing varied as a function of instructed social relevance. Whereas the meet condition was accompanied with unspecific effects regardless of relevance (P1, EPN, viewing potential interaction partners was associated with increased LPP amplitudes. The LPP was specifically enhanced for happy facial expressions of the future interaction partners. This underscores that social relevance can impact face processing already at an early stage of visual processing. These findings are discussed within the framework of motivated attention and face processing theories.

Process and domain specificity in regions engaged for face processing: an fMRI study of perceptual differentiation.

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Collins, Heather R; Zhu, Xun; Bhatt, Ramesh S; Clark, Jonathan D; Joseph, Jane E

2012-12-01

The degree to which face-specific brain regions are specialized for different kinds of perceptual processing is debated. This study parametrically varied demands on featural, first-order configural, or second-order configural processing of faces and houses in a perceptual matching task to determine the extent to which the process of perceptual differentiation was selective for faces regardless of processing type (domain-specific account), specialized for specific types of perceptual processing regardless of category (process-specific account), engaged in category-optimized processing (i.e., configural face processing or featural house processing), or reflected generalized perceptual differentiation (i.e., differentiation that crosses category and processing type boundaries). ROIs were identified in a separate localizer run or with a similarity regressor in the face-matching runs. The predominant principle accounting for fMRI signal modulation in most regions was generalized perceptual differentiation. Nearly all regions showed perceptual differentiation for both faces and houses for more than one processing type, even if the region was identified as face-preferential in the localizer run. Consistent with process specificity, some regions showed perceptual differentiation for first-order processing of faces and houses (right fusiform face area and occipito-temporal cortex and right lateral occipital complex), but not for featural or second-order processing. Somewhat consistent with domain specificity, the right inferior frontal gyrus showed perceptual differentiation only for faces in the featural matching task. The present findings demonstrate that the majority of regions involved in perceptual differentiation of faces are also involved in differentiation of other visually homogenous categories.

Process- and Domain-Specificity in Regions Engaged for Face Processing: An fMRI Study of Perceptual Differentiation

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Collins, Heather R.; Zhu, Xun; Bhatt, Ramesh S.; Clark, Jonathan D.; Joseph, Jane E.

2015-01-01

The degree to which face-specific brain regions are specialized for different kinds of perceptual processing is debated. The present study parametrically varied demands on featural, first-order configural or second-order configural processing of faces and houses in a perceptual matching task to determine the extent to which the process of perceptual differentiation was selective for faces regardless of processing type (domain-specific account), specialized for specific types of perceptual processing regardless of category (process-specific account), engaged in category-optimized processing (i.e., configural face processing or featural house processing) or reflected generalized perceptual differentiation (i.e. differentiation that crosses category and processing type boundaries). Regions of interest were identified in a separate localizer run or with a similarity regressor in the face-matching runs. The predominant principle accounting for fMRI signal modulation in most regions was generalized perceptual differentiation. Nearly all regions showed perceptual differentiation for both faces and houses for more than one processing type, even if the region was identified as face-preferential in the localizer run. Consistent with process-specificity, some regions showed perceptual differentiation for first-order processing of faces and houses (right fusiform face area and occipito-temporal cortex, and right lateral occipital complex), but not for featural or second-order processing. Somewhat consistent with domain-specificity, the right inferior frontal gyrus showed perceptual differentiation only for faces in the featural matching task. The present findings demonstrate that the majority of regions involved in perceptual differentiation of faces are also involved in differentiation of other visually homogenous categories. PMID:22849402

Comparison of Knowledge and Attitudes Using Computer-Based and Face-to-Face Personal Hygiene Training Methods in Food Processing Facilities

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Fenton, Ginger D.; LaBorde, Luke F.; Radhakrishna, Rama B.; Brown, J. Lynne; Cutter, Catherine N.

2006-01-01

Computer-based training is increasingly favored by food companies for training workers due to convenience, self-pacing ability, and ease of use. The objectives of this study were to determine if personal hygiene training, offered through a computer-based method, is as effective as a face-to-face method in knowledge acquisition and improved…

Tolerance for distorted faces: challenges to a configural processing account of familiar face recognition.

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Sandford, Adam; Burton, A Mike

2014-09-01

Face recognition is widely held to rely on 'configural processing', an analysis of spatial relations between facial features. We present three experiments in which viewers were shown distorted faces, and asked to resize these to their correct shape. Based on configural theories appealing to metric distances between features, we reason that this should be an easier task for familiar than unfamiliar faces (whose subtle arrangements of features are unknown). In fact, participants were inaccurate at this task, making between 8% and 13% errors across experiments. Importantly, we observed no advantage for familiar faces: in one experiment participants were more accurate with unfamiliars, and in two experiments there was no difference. These findings were not due to general task difficulty - participants were able to resize blocks of colour to target shapes (squares) more accurately. We also found an advantage of familiarity for resizing other stimuli (brand logos). If configural processing does underlie face recognition, these results place constraints on the definition of 'configural'. Alternatively, familiar face recognition might rely on more complex criteria - based on tolerance to within-person variation rather than highly specific measurement. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Familiar face + novel face = familiar face? Representational bias in the perception of morphed faces in chimpanzees

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Yoshi-Taka Matsuda

2016-08-01

Full Text Available Highly social animals possess a well-developed ability to distinguish the faces of familiar from novel conspecifics to induce distinct behaviors for maintaining society. However, the behaviors of animals when they encounter ambiguous faces of familiar yet novel conspecifics, e.g., strangers with faces resembling known individuals, have not been well characterised. Using a morphing technique and preferential-looking paradigm, we address this question via the chimpanzee’s facial–recognition abilities. We presented eight subjects with three types of stimuli: (1 familiar faces, (2 novel faces and (3 intermediate morphed faces that were 50% familiar and 50% novel faces of conspecifics. We found that chimpanzees spent more time looking at novel faces and scanned novel faces more extensively than familiar or intermediate faces. Interestingly, chimpanzees looked at intermediate faces in a manner similar to familiar faces with regards to the fixation duration, fixation count, and saccade length for facial scanning, even though the participant was encountering the intermediate faces for the first time. We excluded the possibility that subjects merely detected and avoided traces of morphing in the intermediate faces. These findings suggest a bias for a feeling-of-familiarity that chimpanzees perceive familiarity with an intermediate face by detecting traces of a known individual, as 50% alternation is sufficient to perceive familiarity.

'Faceness' and affectivity: evidence for genetic contributions to distinct components of electrocortical response to human faces.

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Shannon, Robert W; Patrick, Christopher J; Venables, Noah C; He, Sheng

2013-12-01

The ability to recognize a variety of different human faces is undoubtedly one of the most important and impressive functions of the human perceptual system. Neuroimaging studies have revealed multiple brain regions (including the FFA, STS, OFA) and electrophysiological studies have identified differing brain event-related potential (ERP) components (e.g., N170, P200) possibly related to distinct types of face information processing. To evaluate the heritability of ERP components associated with face processing, including N170, P200, and LPP, we examined ERP responses to fearful and neutral face stimuli in monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins. Concordance levels for early brain response indices of face processing (N170, P200) were found to be stronger for MZ than DZ twins, providing evidence of a heritable basis to each. These findings support the idea that certain key neural mechanisms for face processing are genetically coded. Implications for understanding individual differences in recognition of facial identity and the emotional content of faces are discussed. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Can Massive but Passive Exposure to Faces Contribute to Face Recognition Abilities?

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Yovel, Galit; Halsband, Keren; Pelleg, Michel; Farkash, Naomi; Gal, Bracha; Goshen-Gottstein, Yonatan

2012-01-01

Recent studies have suggested that individuation of other-race faces is more crucial for enhancing recognition performance than exposure that involves categorization of these faces to an identity-irrelevant criterion. These findings were primarily based on laboratory training protocols that dissociated exposure and individuation by using…

Processing of emotional faces in congenital amusia: An emotional music priming event-related potential study.

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Zhishuai, Jin; Hong, Liu; Daxing, Wu; Pin, Zhang; Xuejing, Lu

2017-01-01

Congenital amusia is characterized by lifelong impairments in music perception and processing. It is unclear whether pitch detection deficits impact amusic individuals' perception of musical emotion. In the current work, 19 amusics and 21 healthy controls were subjected to electroencephalography (EEG) while being exposed to music excerpts and emotional faces. We assessed each individual's ability to discriminate positive- and negative-valenced emotional faces and analyzed electrophysiological indices, in the form of event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded at 32 sites, following exposure to emotionally positive or negative music excerpts. We observed smaller N2 amplitudes in response to facial expressions in the amusia group than in the control group, suggesting that amusics were less affected by the musical stimuli. The late-positive component (LPC) in amusics was similar to that in controls. Our results suggest that the neurocognitive deficit characteristic of congenital amusia is fundamentally an impairment in musical information processing rather than an impairment in emotional processing.

Processing of emotional faces in congenital amusia: An emotional music priming event-related potential study

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Jin Zhishuai

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Congenital amusia is characterized by lifelong impairments in music perception and processing. It is unclear whether pitch detection deficits impact amusic individuals' perception of musical emotion. In the current work, 19 amusics and 21 healthy controls were subjected to electroencephalography (EEG while being exposed to music excerpts and emotional faces. We assessed each individual's ability to discriminate positive- and negative-valenced emotional faces and analyzed electrophysiological indices, in the form of event-related potentials (ERPs recorded at 32 sites, following exposure to emotionally positive or negative music excerpts. We observed smaller N2 amplitudes in response to facial expressions in the amusia group than in the control group, suggesting that amusics were less affected by the musical stimuli. The late-positive component (LPC in amusics was similar to that in controls. Our results suggest that the neurocognitive deficit characteristic of congenital amusia is fundamentally an impairment in musical information processing rather than an impairment in emotional processing.

Face-sensitive processes one hundred milliseconds after picture onset

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Benjamin eDering

2011-09-01

Full Text Available The human face is the most studied object category in visual neuroscience. In a quest for markers of face processing, event-related potential (ERP studies have debated whether two peaks of activity –P1 and N170– are category-selective. Whilst most studies have used photographs of unaltered images of faces, others have used cropped faces in an attempt to reduce the influence of features surrounding the face-object sensu stricto. However, results from studies comparing cropped faces with unaltered objects from other categories are inconsistent with results from studies comparing whole faces and objects. Here, we recorded ERPs elicited by full-front views of faces and cars, either unaltered or cropped. We found that cropping artificially enhanced the N170 whereas it did not significantly modulate P1. In a second experiment, we compared faces and butterflies, either unaltered or cropped, matched for size and luminance across conditions, and within a narrow contrast bracket. Results of experiment 2 replicated the main findings of experiment 1. We then used face-car morphs in a third experiment to manipulate the perceived face-likeness of stimuli (100% face, 70% face and 30% car, 30% face and 70% car, or 100% car and the N170 failed to differentiate between faces and cars. Critically, in all three experiments, P1 amplitude was modulated in a face-sensitive fashion independent of cropping or morphing. Therefore, P1 is a reliable event sensitive to face processing as early as 100 ms after picture onset.

Visual processing in patients with age-related macular degeneration performing a face detection test

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Vottonen P

2017-07-01

Full Text Available Pasi Vottonen,1 Kai Kaarniranta,1,2 Ari Pääkkönen,3 Ina M Tarkka4 1Department of Ophthalmology, Kuopio University Hospital, Kuopio, Finland; 2Department of Ophthalmology, Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland; 3Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland; 4Department of Health Sciences, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland Purpose: People with age-related macular degeneration (AMD have difficulties in familiar face recognition and facial expression discrimination. Our aim was to evaluate the visual processing of faces in AMD patients and whether this would be improved by anti-vascular endothelial growth factor therapy. This was a prospective interventional cohort study. Patients: Twelve patients with monocular wet AMD and 6 control subjects were recruited. Face detection processes were studied using cortical event-related potentials (ERPs. Patients received 3 bevacizumab intravitreal injections to the single affected eye. At baseline and 4–6 weeks after the last injection, clinical presentation and ERPs of the face task were evaluated. Face pictures were shown as targets (16.7% among standard pictures of pixelated faces in an oddball-type paradigm. Results: Face pictures elicited well-defined electrical components in occipital and parieto-occipital cortical areas at baseline and after treatment. The face-specific N170 component was evident in all subjects with longer peak latency in patients than in controls (170±13 vs 155±14, P=0.032. Unexpectedly, an early component reflecting unintentional prediction of perceiving a face, that is, deviance-related negativity, was present in patients and controls. Visual acuity of the affected eye seemed improved in patients from logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution 0.71 (±0.33 to 0.52 (±0.39 by 119 (±23 days without accompanying significant change in face

Holistic Processing in the Composite Task Depends on Face Size.

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Ross, David A; Gauthier, Isabel

Holistic processing is a hallmark of face processing. There is evidence that holistic processing is strongest for faces at identification distance, 2 - 10 meters from the observer. However, this evidence is based on tasks that have been little used in the literature and that are indirect measures of holistic processing. We use the composite task- a well validated and frequently used paradigm - to measure the effect of viewing distance on holistic processing. In line with previous work, we find a congruency x alignment effect that is strongest for faces that are close (2m equivalent distance) than for faces that are further away (24m equivalent distance). In contrast, the alignment effect for same trials, used by several authors to measure holistic processing, produced results that are difficult to interpret. We conclude that our results converge with previous findings providing more direct evidence for an effect of size on holistic processing.

Examining the relationship between face processing and social interaction behavior in children with and without autism spectrum disorder

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Corbett, Blythe A; Newsom, Cassandra; Key, Alexandra P; Qualls, Lydia R; Edmiston, E Kale

2014-01-01

Background Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show impairment in reciprocal social communication, which includes deficits in social cognition and behavior. Since social cognition and social behavior are considered to be interdependent, it is valuable to examine social processes on multiple levels of analysis. Neuropsychological measures of face processing often reveal deficits in social cognition in ASD including the ability to identify and remember facial information. However, the ...

Selective Interference on the Holistic Processing of Faces in Working Memory

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Cheung, Olivia S.; Gauthier, Isabel

2010-01-01

Faces and objects of expertise compete for early perceptual processes and holistic processing resources (Gauthier, Curran, Curby, & Collins, 2003). Here, we examined the nature of interference on holistic face processing in working memory by comparing how various types of loads affect selective attention to parts of face composites. In dual…

Childhood contact predicts hemispheric asymmetry in cross-race face processing.

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Davis, Megan M; Hudson, Sean M; Ma, Debbie S; Correll, Joshua

2016-06-01

Participants typically process same-race faces more quickly and more accurately than cross-race faces. This deficit is amplified in the right hemisphere of the brain, presumably due to its involvement in configural processing. The present research tested the idea that cross-race contact tunes cognitive and perceptual systems, influencing this asymmetric race-based deficit in face processing. Participants with high and low levels of contact performed a lateralized recognition task with same- and cross-race faces. Replicating prior work, participants with minimal contact showed cross-race deficits in processing that were larger in the right hemisphere. For participants with more contact, this lateralized deficit disappeared. This effect of contact seems to be independent of race-based attitudes (e.g., prejudice).

Dissociating Face Identity and Facial Expression Processing Via Visual Adaptation

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Hong Xu

2012-10-01

Full Text Available Face identity and facial expression are processed in two distinct neural pathways. However, most of the existing face adaptation literature studies them separately, despite the fact that they are two aspects from the same face. The current study conducted a systematic comparison between these two aspects by face adaptation, investigating how top- and bottom-half face parts contribute to the processing of face identity and facial expression. A real face (sad, “Adam” and its two size-equivalent face parts (top- and bottom-half were used as the adaptor in separate conditions. For face identity adaptation, the test stimuli were generated by morphing Adam's sad face with another person's sad face (“Sam”. For facial expression adaptation, the test stimuli were created by morphing Adam's sad face with his neutral face and morphing the neutral face with his happy face. In each trial, after exposure to the adaptor, observers indicated the perceived face identity or facial expression of the following test face via a key press. They were also tested in a baseline condition without adaptation. Results show that the top- and bottom-half face each generated a significant face identity aftereffect. However, the aftereffect by top-half face adaptation is much larger than that by the bottom-half face. On the contrary, only the bottom-half face generated a significant facial expression aftereffect. This dissociation of top- and bottom-half face adaptation suggests that face parts play different roles in face identity and facial expression. It thus provides further evidence for the distributed systems of face perception.

Faces in context: A review and systematization of contextual influences on affective face processing

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Matthias J Wieser

2012-11-01

Full Text Available Facial expressions are of eminent importance for social interaction as they convey information about other individuals’ emotions and social intentions. According to the predominant basic emotion approach, the perception of emotion in faces is based on the rapid, automatic categorization of prototypical, universal expressions. Consequently, the perception of facial expressions has typically been investigated using isolated, decontextualized, static pictures of facial expressions that maximize the distinction between categories. However, in everyday life, an individual’s face is not perceived in isolation, but almost always appears within a situational context, which may arise from other people, the physical environment surrounding the face, as well as multichannel information from the sender. Furthermore, situational context may be provided by the perceiver, including already present social information gained from affective learning and implicit processing biases such as race bias. Thus, the perception of facial expressions is presumably always influenced by contextual variables. In this comprehensive review, we aim at 1 systematizing the contextual variables that may influence the perception of facial expressions and 2 summarizing experimental paradigms and findings that have been used to investigate these influences. The studies reviewed here demonstrate that perception and neural processing of facial expressions are substantially modified by contextual information, including verbal, visual, and auditory information presented together with the face as well as knowledge or processing biases already present in the observer. These findings further challenge the assumption of automatic, hardwired categorical emotion extraction mechanisms predicted by basic emotion theories. Taking into account a recent model on face processing, we discuss where and when these different contextual influences may take place, thus outlining potential avenues in

Validation of the Vanderbilt Holistic Face Processing Test

OpenAIRE

Wang, Chao-Chih; Ross, David A.; Gauthier, Isabel; Richler, Jennifer J.

2016-01-01

The Vanderbilt Holistic Face Processing Test (VHPT-F) is a new measure of holistic face processing with better psychometric properties relative to prior measures developed for group studies (Richler et al., 2014). In fields where psychologists study individual differences, validation studies are commonplace and the concurrent validity of a new measure is established by comparing it to an older measure with established validity. We follow this approach and test whether the VHPT-F measures the ...

Validation of the Vanderbilt Holistic Face Processing Test.

OpenAIRE

Chao-Chih Wang; Chao-Chih Wang; David Andrew Ross; Isabel Gauthier; Jennifer Joanna Richler

2016-01-01

The Vanderbilt Holistic Face Processing Test (VHPT-F) is a new measure of holistic face processing with better psychometric properties relative to prior measures developed for group studies (Richler et al., 2014). In fields where psychologists study individual differences, validation studies are commonplace and the concurrent validity of a new measure is established by comparing it to an older measure with established validity. We follow this approach and test whether the VHPT-F measures the ...

The effect of texture on face identification and configural information processing

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Tzschaschel Eva Alica

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Shape and texture are an integral part of face identity. In the present study, the importance of face texture for face identification and detection of configural manipulation (i.e., spatial relation among facial features was examined by comparing grayscale face photographs (i.e., real faces and line drawings of the same faces. Whereas real faces provide information about texture and shape of faces, line drawings are lacking texture cues. A change-detection task and a forced-choice identification task were used with both stimuli categories. Within the change detection task, participants had to decide whether the size of the eyes of two sequentially presented faces had changed or not. After having made this decision, three faces were shown to the subjects and they had to identify the previously shown face among them. Furthermore, context (full vs. cropped faces and orientation (upright vs. inverted were manipulated. The results obtained in the change detection task suggest that configural information was used in processing real faces, while part-based and featural information was used in processing line-drawings. Additionally, real faces were identified more accurately than line drawings, and identification was less context but more orientation sensitive than identification of line drawings. Taken together, the results of the present study provide new evidence stressing the importance of face texture for identity encoding and configural face processing.

Conceptions of ability as stable and self-evaluative processes: a longitudinal examination.

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Pomerantz, E M; Saxon, J L

2001-01-01

It has generally been taken for granted that conceiving of ability as stable leads to negative self-evaluative processes, particularly in the face of failure. Yet, a close examination of the empirical findings suggests that the picture may be more complex. In this research, a three-wave longitudinal design spanning 12 months was employed. Older elementary school children (N = 932) indicated their conceptions of academic and social ability as stable to external forces and to internal forces. They also provided information about the importance they place on academic and social competence, their knowledge about academic and social performance, their preference for academic challenge, their perceptions of academic and social competence, and their attributions for academic and social performance. Children's grades in school and their acceptance by peers were obtained as indicators of performance. Over time, conceiving of ability as stable to external forces, particularly in the academic domain, appeared to heighten the importance placed on competence, performance knowledge, preference for challenge, perceptions of competence, and self-enhancing attributions. In contrast, conceptions of ability as stable to internal forces, particularly in the academic domain, appeared to be fostered by placing little importance on competence, a lack of performance knowledge, avoidance of challenge, negative perceptions of competence, self-deprecating attributions, and poor performance.

The neuropsychology of face perception : beyond simple dissociations and functional selectivity.

OpenAIRE

Atkinson, A.P.; Adolphs, R.

2011-01-01

Face processing relies on a distributed, patchy network of cortical regions in the temporal and frontal lobes that respond disproportionately to face stimuli, other cortical regions that are not even primarily visual (such as somatosensory cortex), and subcortical structures such as the amygdala. Higher-level face perception abilities, such as judging identity, emotion and trustworthiness, appear to rely on an intact face-processing network that includes the occipital face area (OFA), whereas...

Neurocognitive and electrophysiological evidence of altered face processing in parents of children with autism: implications for a model of abnormal development of social brain circuitry in autism.

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Dawson, Geraldine; Webb, Sara Jane; Wijsman, Ellen; Schellenberg, Gerard; Estes, Annette; Munson, Jeffrey; Faja, Susan

2005-01-01

Neuroimaging and behavioral studies have shown that children and adults with autism have impaired face recognition. Individuals with autism also exhibit atypical event-related brain potentials to faces, characterized by a failure to show a negative component (N170) latency advantage to face compared to nonface stimuli and a bilateral, rather than right lateralized, pattern of N170 distribution. In this report, performance by 143 parents of children with autism on standardized verbal, visual-spatial, and face recognition tasks was examined. It was found that parents of children with autism exhibited a significant decrement in face recognition ability relative to their verbal and visual spatial abilities. Event-related brain potentials to face and nonface stimuli were examined in 21 parents of children with autism and 21 control adults. Parents of children with autism showed an atypical event-related potential response to faces, which mirrored the pattern shown by children and adults with autism. These results raise the possibility that face processing might be a functional trait marker of genetic susceptibility to autism. Discussion focuses on hypotheses regarding the neurodevelopmental and genetic basis of altered face processing in autism. A general model of the normal emergence of social brain circuitry in the first year of life is proposed, followed by a discussion of how the trajectory of normal development of social brain circuitry, including cortical specialization for face processing, is altered in individuals with autism. The hypothesis that genetic-mediated dysfunction of the dopamine reward system, especially its functioning in social contexts, might account for altered face processing in individuals with autism and their relatives is discussed.

A regional composite-face effect for species-specific recognition: Upper and lower halves play different roles in holistic processing of monkey faces.

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Wang, Zhe; Quinn, Paul C; Jin, Haiyang; Sun, Yu-Hao P; Tanaka, James W; Pascalis, Olivier; Lee, Kang

2018-04-25

Using a composite-face paradigm, we examined the holistic processing induced by Asian faces, Caucasian faces, and monkey faces with human Asian participants in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether the upper halves of two faces successively presented were the same or different. A composite-face effect was found for Asian faces and Caucasian faces, but not for monkey faces. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to judge whether the lower halves of the two faces successively presented were the same or different. A composite-face effect was found for monkey faces as well as for Asian faces and Caucasian faces. Collectively, these results reveal that own-species (i.e., own-race and other-race) faces engage holistic processing in both upper and lower halves of the face, but other-species (i.e., monkey) faces engage holistic processing only when participants are asked to match the lower halves of the face. The findings are discussed in the context of a region-based holistic processing account for the species-specific effect in face recognition. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The activation of visual face memory and explicit face recognition are delayed in developmental prosopagnosia.

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Parketny, Joanna; Towler, John; Eimer, Martin

2015-08-01

Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DP) are strongly impaired in recognizing faces, but the causes of this deficit are not well understood. We employed event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to study the time-course of neural processes involved in the recognition of previously unfamiliar faces in DPs and in age-matched control participants with normal face recognition abilities. Faces of different individuals were presented sequentially in one of three possible views, and participants had to detect a specific Target Face ("Joe"). EEG was recorded during task performance to Target Faces, Nontarget Faces, or the participants' Own Face (which had to be ignored). The N250 component was measured as a marker of the match between a seen face and a stored representation in visual face memory. The subsequent P600f was measured as an index of attentional processes associated with the conscious awareness and recognition of a particular face. Target Faces elicited reliable N250 and P600f in the DP group, but both of these components emerged later in DPs than in control participants. This shows that the activation of visual face memory for previously unknown learned faces and the subsequent attentional processing and conscious recognition of these faces are delayed in DP. N250 and P600f components to Own Faces did not differ between the two groups, indicating that the processing of long-term familiar faces is less affected in DP. However, P600f components to Own Faces were absent in two participants with DP who failed to recognize their Own Face during the experiment. These results provide new evidence that face recognition deficits in DP may be linked to a delayed activation of visual face memory and explicit identity recognition mechanisms. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Effect of Self-Referential Expectation on Emotional Face Processing.

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Mel McKendrick

Full Text Available The role of self-relevance has been somewhat neglected in static face processing paradigms but may be important in understanding how emotional faces impact on attention, cognition and affect. The aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of self-relevant primes on processing emotional composite faces. Sentence primes created an expectation of the emotion of the face before sad, happy, neutral or composite face photos were viewed. Eye movements were recorded and subsequent responses measured the cognitive and affective impact of the emotion expressed. Results indicated that primes did not guide attention, but impacted on judgments of valence intensity and self-esteem ratings. Negative self-relevant primes led to the most negative self-esteem ratings, although the effect of the prime was qualified by salient facial features. Self-relevant expectations about the emotion of a face and subsequent attention to a face that is congruent with these expectations strengthened the affective impact of viewing the face.

Brain Signals of Face Processing as Revealed by Event-Related Potentials

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Ela I. Olivares

2015-01-01

Full Text Available We analyze the functional significance of different event-related potentials (ERPs as electrophysiological indices of face perception and face recognition, according to cognitive and neurofunctional models of face processing. Initially, the processing of faces seems to be supported by early extrastriate occipital cortices and revealed by modulations of the occipital P1. This early response is thought to reflect the detection of certain primary structural aspects indicating the presence grosso modo of a face within the visual field. The posterior-temporal N170 is more sensitive to the detection of faces as complex-structured stimuli and, therefore, to the presence of its distinctive organizational characteristics prior to within-category identification. In turn, the relatively late and probably more rostrally generated N250r and N400-like responses might respectively indicate processes of access and retrieval of face-related information, which is stored in long-term memory (LTM. New methods of analysis of electrophysiological and neuroanatomical data, namely, dynamic causal modeling, single-trial and time-frequency analyses, are highly recommended to advance in the knowledge of those brain mechanisms concerning face processing.

Handedness is related to neural mechanisms underlying hemispheric lateralization of face processing

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Frässle, Stefan; Krach, Sören; Paulus, Frieder Michel; Jansen, Andreas

2016-06-01

While the right-hemispheric lateralization of the face perception network is well established, recent evidence suggests that handedness affects the cerebral lateralization of face processing at the hierarchical level of the fusiform face area (FFA). However, the neural mechanisms underlying differential hemispheric lateralization of face perception in right- and left-handers are largely unknown. Using dynamic causal modeling (DCM) for fMRI, we aimed to unravel the putative processes that mediate handedness-related differences by investigating the effective connectivity in the bilateral core face perception network. Our results reveal an enhanced recruitment of the left FFA in left-handers compared to right-handers, as evidenced by more pronounced face-specific modulatory influences on both intra- and interhemispheric connections. As structural and physiological correlates of handedness-related differences in face processing, right- and left-handers varied with regard to their gray matter volume in the left fusiform gyrus and their pupil responses to face stimuli. Overall, these results describe how handedness is related to the lateralization of the core face perception network, and point to different neural mechanisms underlying face processing in right- and left-handers. In a wider context, this demonstrates the entanglement of structurally and functionally remote brain networks, suggesting a broader underlying process regulating brain lateralization.

Super-recognition in development: A case study of an adolescent with extraordinary face recognition skills.

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Bennetts, Rachel J; Mole, Joseph; Bate, Sarah

2017-09-01

Face recognition abilities vary widely. While face recognition deficits have been reported in children, it is unclear whether superior face recognition skills can be encountered during development. This paper presents O.B., a 14-year-old female with extraordinary face recognition skills: a "super-recognizer" (SR). O.B. demonstrated exceptional face-processing skills across multiple tasks, with a level of performance that is comparable to adult SRs. Her superior abilities appear to be specific to face identity: She showed an exaggerated face inversion effect and her superior abilities did not extend to object processing or non-identity aspects of face recognition. Finally, an eye-movement task demonstrated that O.B. spent more time than controls examining the nose - a pattern previously reported in adult SRs. O.B. is therefore particularly skilled at extracting and using identity-specific facial cues, indicating that face and object recognition are dissociable during development, and that super recognition can be detected in adolescence.

Face shape and face identity processing in behavioral variant fronto-temporal dementia: A specific deficit for familiarity and name recognition of famous faces.

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De Winter, François-Laurent; Timmers, Dorien; de Gelder, Beatrice; Van Orshoven, Marc; Vieren, Marleen; Bouckaert, Miriam; Cypers, Gert; Caekebeke, Jo; Van de Vliet, Laura; Goffin, Karolien; Van Laere, Koen; Sunaert, Stefan; Vandenberghe, Rik; Vandenbulcke, Mathieu; Van den Stock, Jan

2016-01-01

Deficits in face processing have been described in the behavioral variant of fronto-temporal dementia (bvFTD), primarily regarding the recognition of facial expressions. Less is known about face shape and face identity processing. Here we used a hierarchical strategy targeting face shape and face identity recognition in bvFTD and matched healthy controls. Participants performed 3 psychophysical experiments targeting face shape detection (Experiment 1), unfamiliar face identity matching (Experiment 2), familiarity categorization and famous face-name matching (Experiment 3). The results revealed group differences only in Experiment 3, with a deficit in the bvFTD group for both familiarity categorization and famous face-name matching. Voxel-based morphometry regression analyses in the bvFTD group revealed an association between grey matter volume of the left ventral anterior temporal lobe and familiarity recognition, while face-name matching correlated with grey matter volume of the bilateral ventral anterior temporal lobes. Subsequently, we quantified familiarity-specific and name-specific recognition deficits as the sum of the celebrities of which respectively only the name or only the familiarity was accurately recognized. Both indices were associated with grey matter volume of the bilateral anterior temporal cortices. These findings extent previous results by documenting the involvement of the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in familiarity detection and the right ATL in name recognition deficits in fronto-temporal lobar degeneration.

Face Validity of the Single Work Ability Item: Comparison with Objectively Measured Heart Rate Reserve over Several Days

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Gupta, Nidhi; Jensen, Bjørn Søvsø; Søgaard, Karen; Carneiro, Isabella Gomes; Christiansen, Caroline Stordal; Hanisch, Christiana; Holtermann, Andreas

2014-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the face validity of the self-reported single item work ability with objectively measured heart rate reserve (%HRR) among blue-collar workers. Methods: We utilized data from 127 blue-collar workers (Female = 53; Male = 74) aged 18–65 years from the cross-sectional “New method for Objective Measurements of physical Activity in Daily living (NOMAD)” study. The workers reported their single item work ability and completed an aerobic capacity cycling test and objective measurements of heart rate reserve monitored with Actiheart for 3–4 days with a total of 5,810 h, including 2,640 working hours. Results: A significant moderate correlation between work ability and %HRR was observed among males (R = −0.33, P = 0.005), but not among females (R = 0.11, P = 0.431). In a gender-stratified multi-adjusted logistic regression analysis, males with high %HRR were more likely to report a reduced work ability compared to males with low %HRR [OR = 4.75, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) = 1.31 to 17.25]. However, this association was not found among females (OR = 0.26, 95% CI 0.03 to 2.16), and a significant interaction between work ability, %HRR and gender was observed (P = 0.03). Conclusions: The observed association between work ability and objectively measured %HRR over several days among male blue-collar workers supports the face validity of the single work ability item. It is a useful and valid measure of the relation between physical work demands and resources among male blue-collar workers. The contrasting association among females needs to be further investigated. PMID:24840350

Face Validity of the Single Work Ability Item: Comparison with Objectively Measured Heart Rate Reserve over Several Days

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Nidhi Gupta

2014-05-01

Full Text Available Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the face validity of the self-reported single item work ability with objectively measured heart rate reserve (%HRR among blue-collar workers. Methods: We utilized data from 127 blue-collar workers (Female = 53; Male = 74 aged 18–65 years from the cross-sectional “New method for Objective Measurements of physical Activity in Daily living (NOMAD” study. The workers reported their single item work ability and completed an aerobic capacity cycling test and objective measurements of heart rate reserve monitored with Actiheart for 3–4 days with a total of 5,810 h, including 2,640 working hours. Results: A significant moderate correlation between work ability and %HRR was observed among males (R = −0.33, P = 0.005, but not among females (R = 0.11, P = 0.431. In a gender-stratified multi-adjusted logistic regression analysis, males with high %HRR were more likely to report a reduced work ability compared to males with low %HRR [OR = 4.75, 95% confidence interval (95% CI = 1.31 to 17.25]. However, this association was not found among females (OR = 0.26, 95% CI 0.03 to 2.16, and a significant interaction between work ability, %HRR and gender was observed (P = 0.03. Conclusions: The observed association between work ability and objectively measured %HRR over several days among male blue-collar workers supports the face validity of the single work ability item. It is a useful and valid measure of the relation between physical work demands and resources among male blue-collar workers. The contrasting association among females needs to be further investigated.

Altered organization of face processing networks in temporal lobe epilepsy

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Riley, Jeffrey D.; Fling, Brett W.; Cramer, Steven C.; Lin, Jack J.

2015-01-01

SUMMARY Objective Deficits in social cognition are common and significant in people with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), but the functional and structural underpinnings remain unclear. The present study investigated how the side of seizure focus impacts face processing networks in temporal lobe epilepsy. Methods We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of a face processing paradigm to identify face responsive regions in 24 individuals with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy (Left = 15; Right = 9) and 19 healthy controls. fMRI signals of face responsive regions ispilateral and contralateral to the side of seizure onset were delineated in TLE and compared to the healthy controls with right and left side combined. Diffusion tensor images were acquired to investigate structural connectivity between face regions that differed in fMRI signals between the two groups. Results In temporal lobe epilepsy, activation of the cortical face processing networks varied according to side of seizure onset. In temporal lobe epilepsy, the laterality of amygdala activation was shifted to the side contralateral to the seizure focus while controls showed no significant asymmetry. Furthermore, compared to controls, patients with TLE showed decreased activation of the occipital face responsive region in the ipsilateral side and an increased activity of the anterior temporal lobe in the contralateral side to the seizure focus. Probabilistic tractography revealed that the occipital face area and anterior temporal lobe are connected via the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, which in individuals with temporal lobe epilepsy showed reduced integrity. Significance Taken together, these findings suggest that brain function and white matter integrity of networks subserving face processing are impaired on the side of seizure onset, accompanied by altered responses on the side contralateral to the seizure. PMID:25823855

Human face processing is tuned to sexual age preferences

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Ponseti, J; Granert, O; van Eimeren, T

2014-01-01

Human faces can motivate nurturing behaviour or sexual behaviour when adults see a child or an adult face, respectively. This suggests that face processing is tuned to detecting age cues of sexual maturity to stimulate the appropriate reproductive behaviour: either caretaking or mating....... In paedophilia, sexual attraction is directed to sexually immature children. Therefore, we hypothesized that brain networks that normally are tuned to mature faces of the preferred gender show an abnormal tuning to sexual immature faces in paedophilia. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (f......MRI) to test directly for the existence of a network which is tuned to face cues of sexual maturity. During fMRI, participants sexually attracted to either adults or children were exposed to various face images. In individuals attracted to adults, adult faces activated several brain regions significantly more...

Sex differences in social cognition: The case of face processing.

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Proverbio, Alice Mado

2017-01-02

Several studies have demonstrated that women show a greater interest for social information and empathic attitude than men. This article reviews studies on sex differences in the brain, with particular reference to how males and females process faces and facial expressions, social interactions, pain of others, infant faces, faces in things (pareidolia phenomenon), opposite-sex faces, humans vs. landscapes, incongruent behavior, motor actions, biological motion, erotic pictures, and emotional information. Sex differences in oxytocin-based attachment response and emotional memory are also mentioned. In addition, we investigated how 400 different human faces were evaluated for arousal and valence dimensions by a group of healthy male and female University students. Stimuli were carefully balanced for sensory and perceptual characteristics, age, facial expression, and sex. As a whole, women judged all human faces as more positive and more arousing than men. Furthermore, they showed a preference for the faces of children and the elderly in the arousal evaluation. Regardless of face aesthetics, age, or facial expression, women rated human faces higher than men. The preference for opposite- vs. same-sex faces strongly interacted with facial age. Overall, both women and men exhibited differences in facial processing that could be interpreted in the light of evolutionary psychobiology. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Power effects on implicit prejudice and stereotyping: The role of intergroup face processing.

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Schmid, Petra C; Amodio, David M

2017-04-01

Power is thought to increase discrimination toward subordinate groups, yet its effect on different forms of implicit bias remains unclear. We tested whether power enhances implicit racial stereotyping, in addition to implicit prejudice (i.e., evaluative associations), and examined the effect of power on the automatic processing of faces during implicit tasks. Study 1 showed that manipulated high power increased both forms of implicit bias, relative to low power. Using a neural index of visual face processing (the N170 component of the ERP), Study 2 revealed that power affected the encoding of White ingroup vs. Black outgroup faces. Whereas high power increased the relative processing of outgroup faces during evaluative judgments in the prejudice task, it decreased the relative processing of outgroup faces during stereotype trait judgments. An indirect effect of power on implicit prejudice through enhanced processing of outgroup versus ingroup faces suggested a potential link between face processing and implicit bias. Together, these findings demonstrate that power can affect implicit prejudice and stereotyping as well as early processing of racial ingroup and outgroup faces.

Holistic face processing can inhibit recognition of forensic facial composites.

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McIntyre, Alex H; Hancock, Peter J B; Frowd, Charlie D; Langton, Stephen R H

2016-04-01

Facial composite systems help eyewitnesses to show the appearance of criminals. However, likenesses created by unfamiliar witnesses will not be completely accurate, and people familiar with the target can find them difficult to identify. Faces are processed holistically; we explore whether this impairs identification of inaccurate composite images and whether recognition can be improved. In Experiment 1 (n = 64) an imaging technique was used to make composites of celebrity faces more accurate and identification was contrasted with the original composite images. Corrected composites were better recognized, confirming that errors in production of the likenesses impair identification. The influence of holistic face processing was explored by misaligning the top and bottom parts of the composites (cf. Young, Hellawell, & Hay, 1987). Misalignment impaired recognition of corrected composites but identification of the original, inaccurate composites significantly improved. This effect was replicated with facial composites of noncelebrities in Experiment 2 (n = 57). We conclude that, like real faces, facial composites are processed holistically: recognition is impaired because unlike real faces, composites contain inaccuracies and holistic face processing makes it difficult to perceive identifiable features. This effect was consistent across composites of celebrities and composites of people who are personally familiar. Our findings suggest that identification of forensic facial composites can be enhanced by presenting composites in a misaligned format. (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Genetic specificity of face recognition.

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Shakeshaft, Nicholas G; Plomin, Robert

2015-10-13

Specific cognitive abilities in diverse domains are typically found to be highly heritable and substantially correlated with general cognitive ability (g), both phenotypically and genetically. Recent twin studies have found the ability to memorize and recognize faces to be an exception, being similarly heritable but phenotypically substantially uncorrelated both with g and with general object recognition. However, the genetic relationships between face recognition and other abilities (the extent to which they share a common genetic etiology) cannot be determined from phenotypic associations. In this, to our knowledge, first study of the genetic associations between face recognition and other domains, 2,000 18- and 19-year-old United Kingdom twins completed tests assessing their face recognition, object recognition, and general cognitive abilities. Results confirmed the substantial heritability of face recognition (61%), and multivariate genetic analyses found that most of this genetic influence is unique and not shared with other cognitive abilities.

Association between Ability Emotional Intelligence and Left Insula during Social Judgment of Facial Emotions.

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Quarto, Tiziana; Blasi, Giuseppe; Maddalena, Chiara; Viscanti, Giovanna; Lanciano, Tiziana; Soleti, Emanuela; Mangiulli, Ivan; Taurisano, Paolo; Fazio, Leonardo; Bertolino, Alessandro; Curci, Antonietta

2016-01-01

The human ability of identifying, processing and regulating emotions from social stimuli is generally referred as Emotional Intelligence (EI). Within EI, Ability EI identifies a performance measure assessing individual skills at perceiving, using, understanding and managing emotions. Previous models suggest that a brain "somatic marker circuitry" (SMC) sustains emotional sub-processes included in EI. Three primary brain regions are included: the amygdala, the insula and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Here, our aim was to investigate the relationship between Ability EI scores and SMC activity during social judgment of emotional faces. Sixty-three healthy subjects completed a test measuring Ability EI and underwent fMRI during a social decision task (i.e. approach or avoid) about emotional faces with different facial expressions. Imaging data revealed that EI scores are associated with left insula activity during social judgment of emotional faces as a function of facial expression. Specifically, higher EI scores are associated with greater left insula activity during social judgment of fearful faces but also with lower activity of this region during social judgment of angry faces. These findings indicate that the association between Ability EI and the SMC activity during social behavior is region- and emotion-specific.

Becoming a Lunari or Taiyo expert: learned attention to parts drives holistic processing of faces.

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Chua, Kao-Wei; Richler, Jennifer J; Gauthier, Isabel

2014-06-01

Faces are processed holistically, but the locus of holistic processing remains unclear. We created two novel races of faces (Lunaris and Taiyos) to study how experience with face parts influences holistic processing. In Experiment 1, subjects individuated Lunaris wherein the top, bottom, or both face halves contained diagnostic information. Subjects who learned to attend to face parts exhibited no holistic processing. This suggests that individuation only leads to holistic processing when the whole face is attended. In Experiment 2, subjects individuated both Lunaris and Taiyos, with diagnostic information in complementary face halves of the two races. Holistic processing was measured with composites made of either diagnostic or nondiagnostic face parts. Holistic processing was only observed for composites made from diagnostic face parts, demonstrating that holistic processing can occur for diagnostic face parts that were never seen together. These results suggest that holistic processing is an expression of learned attention to diagnostic face parts. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

Borderline Personality and the Detection of Angry Faces.

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Johanna Hepp

Full Text Available Many studies have assessed emotion recognition in patients with Borderline Personality Disorder and considerable evidence has been accumulated on patients' ability to categorize emotions. In contrast, their ability to detect emotions has been investigated sparsely. The only two studies that assessed emotion detection abilities found contradictory evidence on patients' ability to detect angry faces.To clarify whether patients with Borderline Personality Disorder show enhanced detection of angry faces, we conducted three experiments: a laboratory study (n = 53 with a clinical sample and two highly powered web studies that measured Borderline features (n1 = 342, n2 = 220. Participants in all studies completed a visual search paradigm, and the reaction times for the detection of angry vs. happy faces were measured.Consistently, data spoke against enhanced detection of angry faces in the Borderline groups, indicated by non-significant group (Borderline vs. healthy control × target (angry vs. happy interactions, despite highly satisfactory statistical power to detect even small effects.In contrast to emotion categorization, emotion detection appears to be intact in patients with Borderline Personality Disorder and individuals high in Borderline features. The importance of distinguishing between these two processes in future studies is discussed.

Sex differences in face processing are mediated by handedness and sexual orientation.

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Brewster, Paul W H; Mullin, Caitlin R; Dobrin, Roxana A; Steeves, Jennifer K E

2011-03-01

Previous research has demonstrated sex differences in face processing at both neural and behavioural levels. The present study examined the role of handedness and sexual orientation as mediators of this effect. We compared the performance of LH (left-handed) and RH (right-handed) heterosexual and homosexual male and female participants on a face recognition memory task. Our main findings were that homosexual males have better face recognition memory than both heterosexual males and homosexual women. We also demonstrate better face processing in women than in men. Finally, LH heterosexual participants had better face recognition than LH homosexual participants and also tended to be better than RH heterosexual participants. These findings are consistent with differences in the organisation and laterality of face-processing mechanisms as a function of sex, handedness, and sexual orientation.

Observer's Mood Manipulates Level of Visual Processing: Evidence from Face and Nonface Stimuli

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Setareh Mokhtari

2011-05-01

Full Text Available For investigating the effect of observer's mood on level of processing of visual stimuli, happy or sad mood was induced in two groups of participants through asking them to deliberate one of their sad or happy memories while listening to a congruent piece of music. This was followed by a computer-based task that required counting some features (arcs or lines of emotional schematic faces (with either sad or happy expressions for group 1, and counting same features of meaningless combined shapes for group 2. Reaction time analysis indicated there is a significant difference in RTs after listening to the sad music compared with happy music for group 1; participants with sad moods were significantly slower when they worked on local levels of schematic faces with sad expressions. Happy moods did not show any specific effect on reaction time of participants who were working on local details of emotionally expressive faces. Sad moods or happy moods had no significant effect on reaction time of working on parts of meaningless shapes. It seems that sad moods as a contextual factor elevate the ability of sad expression to grab the attention and block fast access to the local parts of the holistic meaningful shapes.

Suprasegmental information affects processing of talking faces at birth.

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Guellai, Bahia; Mersad, Karima; Streri, Arlette

2015-02-01

From birth, newborns show a preference for faces talking a native language compared to silent faces. The present study addresses two questions that remained unanswered by previous research: (a) Does the familiarity with the language play a role in this process and (b) Are all the linguistic and paralinguistic cues necessary in this case? Experiment 1 extended newborns' preference for native speakers to non-native ones. Given that fetuses and newborns are sensitive to the prosodic characteristics of speech, Experiments 2 and 3 presented faces talking native and nonnative languages with the speech stream being low-pass filtered. Results showed that newborns preferred looking at a person who talked to them even when only the prosodic cues were provided for both languages. Nonetheless, a familiarity preference for the previously talking face is observed in the "normal speech" condition (i.e., Experiment 1) and a novelty preference in the "filtered speech" condition (Experiments 2 and 3). This asymmetry reveals that newborns process these two types of stimuli differently and that they may already be sensitive to a mismatch between the articulatory movements of the face and the corresponding speech sounds. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Enhanced 3D face processing using an active vision system

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Lidegaard, Morten; Larsen, Rasmus; Kraft, Dirk

2014-01-01

We present an active face processing system based on 3D shape information extracted by means of stereo information. We use two sets of stereo cameras with different field of views (FOV): One with a wide FOV is used for face tracking, while the other with a narrow FOV is used for face identification...

Covert face recognition in congenital prosopagnosia: a group study.

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Rivolta, Davide; Palermo, Romina; Schmalzl, Laura; Coltheart, Max

2012-03-01

Even though people with congenital prosopagnosia (CP) never develop a normal ability to "overtly" recognize faces, some individuals show indices of "covert" (or implicit) face recognition. The aim of this study was to demonstrate covert face recognition in CP when participants could not overtly recognize the faces. Eleven people with CP completed three tasks assessing their overt face recognition ability, and three tasks assessing their "covert" face recognition: a Forced choice familiarity task, a Forced choice cued task, and a Priming task. Evidence of covert recognition was observed with the Forced choice familiarity task, but not the Priming task. In addition, we propose that the Forced choice cued task does not measure covert processing as such, but instead "provoked-overt" recognition. Our study clearly shows that people with CP demonstrate covert recognition for faces that they cannot overtly recognize, and that behavioural tasks vary in their sensitivity to detect covert recognition in CP. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Srl. All rights reserved.

Basic abnormalities in visual processing affect face processing at an early age in autism spectrum disorder.

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Vlamings, Petra Hendrika Johanna Maria; Jonkman, Lisa Marthe; van Daalen, Emma; van der Gaag, Rutger Jan; Kemner, Chantal

2010-12-15

A detailed visual processing style has been noted in autism spectrum disorder (ASD); this contributes to problems in face processing and has been directly related to abnormal processing of spatial frequencies (SFs). Little is known about the early development of face processing in ASD and the relation with abnormal SF processing. We investigated whether young ASD children show abnormalities in low spatial frequency (LSF, global) and high spatial frequency (HSF, detailed) processing and explored whether these are crucially involved in the early development of face processing. Three- to 4-year-old children with ASD (n = 22) were compared with developmentally delayed children without ASD (n = 17). Spatial frequency processing was studied by recording visual evoked potentials from visual brain areas while children passively viewed gratings (HSF/LSF). In addition, children watched face stimuli with different expressions, filtered to include only HSF or LSF. Enhanced activity in visual brain areas was found in response to HSF versus LSF information in children with ASD, in contrast to control subjects. Furthermore, facial-expression processing was also primarily driven by detail in ASD. Enhanced visual processing of detailed (HSF) information is present early in ASD and occurs for neutral (gratings), as well as for socially relevant stimuli (facial expressions). These data indicate that there is a general abnormality in visual SF processing in early ASD and are in agreement with suggestions that a fast LSF subcortical face processing route might be affected in ASD. This could suggest that abnormal visual processing is causative in the development of social problems in ASD. Copyright © 2010 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Mental rotation of faces in healthy aging and Alzheimer's disease.

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Cassandra A Adduri

Full Text Available BACKGROUND: Previous research has shown that individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD develop visuospatial difficulties that affect their ability to mentally rotate objects. Surprisingly, the existing literature has generally ignored the impact of this mental rotation deficit on the ability of AD patients to recognize faces from different angles. Instead, the devastating loss of the ability to recognize friends and family members in AD has primarily been attributed to memory loss and agnosia in later stages of the disorder. The impact of AD on areas of the brain important for mental rotation should not be overlooked by face processing investigations -- even in early stages of the disorder. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: This study investigated the sensitivity of face processing in AD, young controls and older non-neurological controls to two changes of the stimuli -- a rotation in depth and an inversion. The control groups showed a systematic effect of depth rotation, with errors increasing with the angle of rotation, and with inversion. The majority of the AD group was not impaired when faces were presented upright and no transformation in depth was required, and were most accurate when all faces were presented in frontal views, but accuracy was severely impaired with any rotation or inversion. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These results suggest that with the onset of AD, mental rotation difficulties arise that affect the ability to recognize faces presented at different angles. The finding that a frontal view is "preferred" by these patients provides a valuable communication strategy for health care workers.

Developmental Changes in Face Recognition during Childhood: Evidence from Upright and Inverted Faces

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de Heering, Adelaide; Rossion, Bruno; Maurer, Daphne

2012-01-01

Adults are experts at recognizing faces but there is controversy about how this ability develops with age. We assessed 6- to 12-year-olds and adults using a digitized version of the Benton Face Recognition Test, a sensitive tool for assessing face perception abilities. Children's response times for correct responses did not decrease between ages 6…

Facial emotion recognition, face scan paths, and face perception in children with neurofibromatosis type 1.

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Lewis, Amelia K; Porter, Melanie A; Williams, Tracey A; Bzishvili, Samantha; North, Kathryn N; Payne, Jonathan M

2017-05-01

This study aimed to investigate face scan paths and face perception abilities in children with Neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF1) and how these might relate to emotion recognition abilities in this population. The authors investigated facial emotion recognition, face scan paths, and face perception in 29 children with NF1 compared to 29 chronological age-matched typically developing controls. Correlations between facial emotion recognition, face scan paths, and face perception in children with NF1 were examined. Children with NF1 displayed significantly poorer recognition of fearful expressions compared to controls, as well as a nonsignificant trend toward poorer recognition of anger. Although there was no significant difference between groups in time spent viewing individual core facial features (eyes, nose, mouth, and nonfeature regions), children with NF1 spent significantly less time than controls viewing the face as a whole. Children with NF1 also displayed significantly poorer face perception abilities than typically developing controls. Facial emotion recognition deficits were not significantly associated with aberrant face scan paths or face perception abilities in the NF1 group. These results suggest that impairments in the perception, identification, and interpretation of information from faces are important aspects of the social-cognitive phenotype of NF1. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Are Face and Object Recognition Independent? A Neurocomputational Modeling Exploration.

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Wang, Panqu; Gauthier, Isabel; Cottrell, Garrison

2016-04-01

Are face and object recognition abilities independent? Although it is commonly believed that they are, Gauthier et al. [Gauthier, I., McGugin, R. W., Richler, J. J., Herzmann, G., Speegle, M., & VanGulick, A. E. Experience moderates overlap between object and face recognition, suggesting a common ability. Journal of Vision, 14, 7, 2014] recently showed that these abilities become more correlated as experience with nonface categories increases. They argued that there is a single underlying visual ability, v, that is expressed in performance with both face and nonface categories as experience grows. Using the Cambridge Face Memory Test and the Vanderbilt Expertise Test, they showed that the shared variance between Cambridge Face Memory Test and Vanderbilt Expertise Test performance increases monotonically as experience increases. Here, we address why a shared resource across different visual domains does not lead to competition and to an inverse correlation in abilities? We explain this conundrum using our neurocomputational model of face and object processing ["The Model", TM, Cottrell, G. W., & Hsiao, J. H. Neurocomputational models of face processing. In A. J. Calder, G. Rhodes, M. Johnson, & J. Haxby (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of face perception. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011]. We model the domain general ability v as the available computational resources (number of hidden units) in the mapping from input to label and experience as the frequency of individual exemplars in an object category appearing during network training. Our results show that, as in the behavioral data, the correlation between subordinate level face and object recognition accuracy increases as experience grows. We suggest that different domains do not compete for resources because the relevant features are shared between faces and objects. The essential power of experience is to generate a "spreading transform" for faces (separating them in representational space) that

Association between Ability Emotional Intelligence and Left Insula during Social Judgment of Facial Emotions.

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Tiziana Quarto

Full Text Available The human ability of identifying, processing and regulating emotions from social stimuli is generally referred as Emotional Intelligence (EI. Within EI, Ability EI identifies a performance measure assessing individual skills at perceiving, using, understanding and managing emotions. Previous models suggest that a brain "somatic marker circuitry" (SMC sustains emotional sub-processes included in EI. Three primary brain regions are included: the amygdala, the insula and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC. Here, our aim was to investigate the relationship between Ability EI scores and SMC activity during social judgment of emotional faces. Sixty-three healthy subjects completed a test measuring Ability EI and underwent fMRI during a social decision task (i.e. approach or avoid about emotional faces with different facial expressions. Imaging data revealed that EI scores are associated with left insula activity during social judgment of emotional faces as a function of facial expression. Specifically, higher EI scores are associated with greater left insula activity during social judgment of fearful faces but also with lower activity of this region during social judgment of angry faces. These findings indicate that the association between Ability EI and the SMC activity during social behavior is region- and emotion-specific.

Recognition of face and non-face stimuli in autistic spectrum disorder.

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Arkush, Leo; Smith-Collins, Adam P R; Fiorentini, Chiara; Skuse, David H

2013-12-01

The ability to remember faces is critical for the development of social competence. From childhood to adulthood, we acquire a high level of expertise in the recognition of facial images, and neural processes become dedicated to sustaining competence. Many people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have poor face recognition memory; changes in hairstyle or other non-facial features in an otherwise familiar person affect their recollection skills. The observation implies that they may not use the configuration of the inner face to achieve memory competence, but bolster performance in other ways. We aimed to test this hypothesis by comparing the performance of a group of high-functioning unmedicated adolescents with ASD and a matched control group on a "surprise" face recognition memory task. We compared their memory for unfamiliar faces with their memory for images of houses. To evaluate the role that is played by peripheral cues in assisting recognition memory, we cropped both sets of pictures, retaining only the most salient central features. ASD adolescents had poorer recognition memory for faces than typical controls, but their recognition memory for houses was unimpaired. Cropping images of faces did not disproportionately influence their recall accuracy, relative to controls. House recognition skills (cropped and uncropped) were similar in both groups. In the ASD group only, performance on both sets of task was closely correlated, implying that memory for faces and other complex pictorial stimuli is achieved by domain-general (non-dedicated) cognitive mechanisms. Adolescents with ASD apparently do not use domain-specialized processing of inner facial cues to support face recognition memory. © 2013 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The face inversion effect following pitch and yaw rotations: investigating the boundaries of holistic processing.

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Simone eFavelle

2012-12-01

Full Text Available Upright faces are thought to be processed holistically. However, the range of views within which holistic processing occurs is unknown. Recent research by McKone (2008 suggests that holistic processing occurs for all yaw rotated face views (i.e. full-face through to profile. Here we examined whether holistic processing occurs for pitch, as well as yaw, rotated face views. In this face recognition experiment: (i participants made same/different judgments about two sequentially presented faces (either both upright or both inverted; (ii the test face was pitch/yaw rotated by between 0°-75° from the encoding face (always a full face view. Our logic was as follows: If a particular pitch/yaw rotated face view is being processed holistically when upright, then this processing should be disrupted by inversion. Consistent with previous research, significant face inversion effects (FIEs were found for all yaw rotated views. However, while FIEs were found for pitch rotations up to 45°, none were observed for 75° pitch rotations (rotated either above or below the full face. We conclude that holistic processing does not occur for all views of upright faces (e.g., not for uncommon pitch rotated views, only those that can be matched to a generic global representation of a face.

The Two-Systems Account of Theory of Mind: Testing the Links to Social- Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities

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Bozana Meinhardt-Injac

2018-01-01

Full Text Available According to the two-systems account of theory of mind (ToM, understanding mental states of others involves both fast social-perceptual processes, as well as slower, reflexive cognitive operations (Frith and Frith, 2008; Apperly and Butterfill, 2009. To test the respective roles of specific abilities in either of these processes we administered 15 experimental procedures to a large sample of 343 participants, testing ability in face recognition and holistic perception, language, and reasoning. ToM was measured by a set of tasks requiring ability to track and to infer complex emotional and mental states of others from faces, eyes, spoken language, and prosody. We used structural equation modeling to test the relative strengths of a social-perceptual (face processing related and reflexive-cognitive (language and reasoning related path in predicting ToM ability. The two paths accounted for 58% of ToM variance, thus validating a general two-systems framework. Testing specific predictor paths revealed language and face recognition as strong and significant predictors of ToM. For reasoning, there were neither direct nor mediated effects, albeit reasoning was strongly associated with language. Holistic face perception also failed to show a direct link with ToM ability, while there was a mediated effect via face recognition. These results highlight the respective roles of face recognition and language for the social brain, and contribute closer empirical specification of the general two-systems account.

The Two-Systems Account of Theory of Mind: Testing the Links to Social- Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities.

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Meinhardt-Injac, Bozana; Daum, Moritz M; Meinhardt, Günter; Persike, Malte

2018-01-01

According to the two-systems account of theory of mind (ToM), understanding mental states of others involves both fast social-perceptual processes, as well as slower, reflexive cognitive operations (Frith and Frith, 2008; Apperly and Butterfill, 2009). To test the respective roles of specific abilities in either of these processes we administered 15 experimental procedures to a large sample of 343 participants, testing ability in face recognition and holistic perception, language, and reasoning. ToM was measured by a set of tasks requiring ability to track and to infer complex emotional and mental states of others from faces, eyes, spoken language, and prosody. We used structural equation modeling to test the relative strengths of a social-perceptual (face processing related) and reflexive-cognitive (language and reasoning related) path in predicting ToM ability. The two paths accounted for 58% of ToM variance, thus validating a general two-systems framework. Testing specific predictor paths revealed language and face recognition as strong and significant predictors of ToM. For reasoning, there were neither direct nor mediated effects, albeit reasoning was strongly associated with language. Holistic face perception also failed to show a direct link with ToM ability, while there was a mediated effect via face recognition. These results highlight the respective roles of face recognition and language for the social brain, and contribute closer empirical specification of the general two-systems account.

Self-esteem Modulates the P3 Component in Response to the Self-face Processing after Priming with Emotional Faces

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Lili Guan; Lili Guan; Yufang Zhao; Yige Wang; Yujie Chen; Juan Yang

2017-01-01

The self-face processing advantage (SPA) refers to the research finding that individuals generally recognize their own face faster than another’s face; self-face also elicits an enhanced P3 amplitude compared to another’s face. It has been suggested that social evaluation threats could weaken the SPA and that self-esteem could be regarded as a threat buffer. However, little research has directly investigated the neural evidence of how self-esteem modulates the social evaluation threat to the ...

Social anhedonia is associated with neural abnormalities during face emotion processing.

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Germine, Laura T; Garrido, Lucia; Bruce, Lori; Hooker, Christine

2011-10-01

Human beings are social organisms with an intrinsic desire to seek and participate in social interactions. Social anhedonia is a personality trait characterized by a reduced desire for social affiliation and reduced pleasure derived from interpersonal interactions. Abnormally high levels of social anhedonia prospectively predict the development of schizophrenia and contribute to poorer outcomes for schizophrenia patients. Despite the strong association between social anhedonia and schizophrenia, the neural mechanisms that underlie individual differences in social anhedonia have not been studied and are thus poorly understood. Deficits in face emotion recognition are related to poorer social outcomes in schizophrenia, and it has been suggested that face emotion recognition deficits may be a behavioral marker for schizophrenia liability. In the current study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see whether there are differences in the brain networks underlying basic face emotion processing in a community sample of individuals low vs. high in social anhedonia. We isolated the neural mechanisms related to face emotion processing by comparing face emotion discrimination with four other baseline conditions (identity discrimination of emotional faces, identity discrimination of neutral faces, object discrimination, and pattern discrimination). Results showed a group (high/low social anhedonia) × condition (emotion discrimination/control condition) interaction in the anterior portion of the rostral medial prefrontal cortex, right superior temporal gyrus, and left somatosensory cortex. As predicted, high (relative to low) social anhedonia participants showed less neural activity in face emotion processing regions during emotion discrimination as compared to each control condition. The findings suggest that social anhedonia is associated with abnormalities in networks responsible for basic processes associated with social cognition, and provide a

Impaired holistic processing of left-right composite faces in congenital prosopagnosia.

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Liu, Tina T; Behrmann, Marlene

2014-01-01

Congenital prosopagnosia (CP) refers to a lifelong impairment in face processing despite normal visual and intellectual skills. Many studies have suggested that the key underlying deficit in CP is one of a failure to engage holistic processing. Moreover, there has been some suggestion that, in normal observers, there may be greater involvement of the right than left hemisphere in holistic processing. To examine the proposed deficit in holistic processing and its potential hemispheric atypicality in CP, we compared the performance of 8 CP individuals with both matched controls and a large group of non-matched controls on a novel, vertical composite task. In this task, participants judged whether a cued half of a face (either left or right half) was the same or different at study and test, and the two face halves could be either aligned or misaligned. The standard index of holistic processing is one in which the unattended face half influences performance on the cued half and this influence is greater in the aligned than in the misaligned condition. Relative to controls, the CP participants, both at a group and at an individual level, did not show holistic processing in the vertical composite task. There was also no difference in performance as a function of hemifield of the cued face half in the CP individuals, and this was true in the control participants, as well. The findings clearly confirm the deficit in holistic processing in CP and reveal the useful application of this novel experimental paradigm to this population and potentially to others as well.

Interdependent mechanisms for processing gender and emotion:The special status of angry male faces

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Daniel A Harris

2016-07-01

Full Text Available While some models of how various attributes of a face are processed have posited that face features, invariant physical cues such as gender or ethnicity as well as variant social cues such as emotion, may be processed independently (e.g., Bruce & Young, 1986, other models suggest a more distributed representation and interdependent processing (e.g., Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2000. Here we use a contingent adaptation paradigm to investigate if mechanisms for processing the gender and emotion of a face are interdependent and symmetric across the happy-angry emotional continuum and regardless of the gender of the face. We simultaneously adapted participants to angry female faces and happy male faces (Experiment 1 or to happy female faces and angry male faces (Experiment 2. In Experiment 1 we found evidence for contingent adaptation, with simultaneous aftereffects in opposite directions: male faces were biased towards angry while female faces were biased towards happy. Interestingly, in the complementary Experiment 2 we did not find evidence for contingent adaptation, with both male and female faces biased towards angry. Our results highlight that evidence for contingent adaptation and the underlying interdependent face processing mechanisms that would allow for contingent adaptation may only be evident for certain combinations of face features. Such limits may be especially important in the case of social cues given how maladaptive it may be to stop responding to threatening information, with male angry faces considered to be the most threatening. The underlying neuronal mechanisms that could account for such asymmetric effects in contingent adaptation remain to be elucidated.

EARLY READING ASSESSMENT INSTRUMENTS: ABILITIES AND PROCESSES INVOLVED

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Ana Cláudia de Souza

2017-04-01

Full Text Available This study investigates the following early reading assessment instruments: “Bateria de Recepção e Produção da Linguagem Verbal” (SCLIAR-CABRAL, 2003a and “Teste de Competência de Leitura de Palavras e Pseudopalavras” (SEABRA; CAPOVILLA, 2010. The main research goal is to analyze in each one of these reading assessment instruments some of the multiple cognitive processes and basic low-level abilities involved in reading. In this sense, decoding, word recognition, lexical access, syntactic and textual processing, and comprehension are the cognitive processes taken into account. With regard to the basic reading abilities, accuracy and fluency (rhythm, prosody and speed are considered. The results indicate that each one of the analyzed reading assessment instruments assesses different aspects of the reading processes and abilities, mainly through off-line measures. ScliarCabral’s assessment battery allows the researcher or the teacher to evaluate the following processes: perception of the grapheme opposition in minimal pairs of words and in sentences, difficulties in sentence processing, skills in decoding the graphemic-phonemic relationship, and textual comprehension. In its turn, the reading assessment instrument proposed by Seabra e Capovilla allows one to evaluate student’s reading development level, by classifying the kind of processing as logographic, alphabetic or orthographic.

Processing language in face-to-face conversation: Questions with gestures get faster responses.

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Holler, Judith; Kendrick, Kobin H; Levinson, Stephen C

2017-09-08

The home of human language use is face-to-face interaction, a context in which communicative exchanges are characterised not only by bodily signals accompanying what is being said but also by a pattern of alternating turns at talk. This transition between turns is astonishingly fast-typically a mere 200-ms elapse between a current and a next speaker's contribution-meaning that comprehending, producing, and coordinating conversational contributions in time is a significant challenge. This begs the question of whether the additional information carried by bodily signals facilitates or hinders language processing in this time-pressured environment. We present analyses of multimodal conversations revealing that bodily signals appear to profoundly influence language processing in interaction: Questions accompanied by gestures lead to shorter turn transition times-that is, to faster responses-than questions without gestures, and responses come earlier when gestures end before compared to after the question turn has ended. These findings hold even after taking into account prosodic patterns and other visual signals, such as gaze. The empirical findings presented here provide a first glimpse of the role of the body in the psycholinguistic processes underpinning human communication.

Subjective workload and individual differences in information processing abilities

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Damos, D. L.

1984-01-01

This paper describes several experiments examining the source of individual differences in the experience of mental workload. Three sources of such differences were examined: information processing abilities, timesharing abilities, and personality traits/behavior patterns. On the whole, there was little evidence that individual differences in information processing abilities or timesharing abilities are related to perceived differences in mental workload. However, individuals with strong Type A coronary prone behavior patterns differed in both single- and multiple-task performance from individuals who showed little evidence of such a pattern. Additionally, individuals with a strong Type A pattern showed some dissociation between objective performance and the experience of mental workload.

Neuropsychology of facial expressions. The role of consciousness in processing emotional faces

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Michela Balconi

2012-04-01

Full Text Available Neuropsychological studies have underlined the significant presence of distinct brain correlates deputed to analyze facial expression of emotion. It was observed that some cerebral circuits were considered as specific for emotional face comprehension as a function of conscious vs. unconscious processing of emotional information. Moreover, the emotional content of faces (i.e. positive vs. negative; more or less arousing may have an effect in activating specific cortical networks. Between the others, recent studies have explained the contribution of hemispheres in comprehending face, as a function of type of emotions (mainly related to the distinction positive vs. negative and of specific tasks (comprehending vs. producing facial expressions. Specifically, ERPs (event-related potentials analysis overview is proposed in order to comprehend how face may be processed by an observer and how he can make face a meaningful construct even in absence of awareness. Finally, brain oscillations is considered in order to explain the synchronization of neural populations in response to emotional faces when a conscious vs. unconscious processing is activated

[Comparative studies of face recognition].

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Kawai, Nobuyuki

2012-07-01

Every human being is proficient in face recognition. However, the reason for and the manner in which humans have attained such an ability remain unknown. These questions can be best answered-through comparative studies of face recognition in non-human animals. Studies in both primates and non-primates show that not only primates, but also non-primates possess the ability to extract information from their conspecifics and from human experimenters. Neural specialization for face recognition is shared with mammals in distant taxa, suggesting that face recognition evolved earlier than the emergence of mammals. A recent study indicated that a social insect, the golden paper wasp, can distinguish their conspecific faces, whereas a closely related species, which has a less complex social lifestyle with just one queen ruling a nest of underlings, did not show strong face recognition for their conspecifics. Social complexity and the need to differentiate between one another likely led humans to evolve their face recognition abilities.

Face the hierarchy: ERP and oscillatory brain responses in social rank processing.

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Breton, Audrey; Jerbi, Karim; Henaff, Marie-Anne; Cheylus, Anne; Baudouin, Jean-Yves; Schmitz, Christina; Krolak-Salmon, Pierre; Van der Henst, Jean-Baptiste

2014-01-01

Recognition of social hierarchy is a key feature that helps us navigate through our complex social environment. Neuroimaging studies have identified brain structures involved in the processing of hierarchical stimuli but the precise temporal dynamics of brain activity associated with such processing remains largely unknown. Here, we used electroencephalography to examine the effect of social hierarchy on neural responses elicited by faces. In contrast to previous studies, the key manipulation was that a hierarchical context was constructed, not by varying facial expressions, but by presenting neutral-expression faces in a game setting. Once the performance-based hierarchy was established, participants were presented with high-rank, middle-rank and low-rank player faces and had to evaluate the rank of each face with respect to their own position. Both event-related potentials and task-related oscillatory activity were investigated. Three main findings emerge from the study. First, the experimental manipulation had no effect on the early N170 component, which may suggest that hierarchy did not modulate the structural encoding of neutral-expression faces. Second, hierarchy significantly modulated the amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP) within a 400-700 ms time-window, with more a prominent LPP occurring when the participants processed the face of the highest-rank player. Third, high-rank faces were associated with the highest reduction of alpha power. Taken together these findings provide novel electrophysiological evidence for enhanced allocation of attentional resource in the presence of high-rank faces. At a broader level, this study brings new insights into the neural processing underlying social categorization.

Toddlers with Williams Syndrome Process Upright but Not Inverted Faces Holistically

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Cashon, Cara H.; Ha, Oh-Ryeong; DeNicola, Christopher A.; Mervis, Carolyn B.

2013-01-01

Holistic processing of upright, but not inverted, faces is a marker of perceptual expertise for faces. This pattern is shown by typically developing individuals beginning at age 7 months. Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare neurogenetic developmental disorder characterized by extreme interest in faces from a very young age. Research on the effects of…

Face and emotion recognition deficits in Turner syndrome: a possible role for X-linked genes in amygdala development.

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Lawrence, Kate; Kuntsi, Jonna; Coleman, Michael; Campbell, Ruth; Skuse, David

2003-01-01

Face recognition is thought to rely on configural visual processing. Where face recognition impairments have been identified, qualitatively delayed or anomalous configural processing has also been found. A group of women with Turner syndrome (TS) with monosomy for a single maternal X chromosome (45, Xm) showed an impairment in face recognition skills compared with normally developing women. However, normal configural face-processing abilities were apparent. The ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion, particularly fear, was also impaired in this TS subgroup. Face recognition and fear recognition accuracy were significantly correlated in the female control group but not in women with TS. The authors therefore suggest that anomalies in amygdala function may be a neurological feature of TS of this karyotype.

Cognitive demands of face monitoring: evidence for visuospatial overload.

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Doherty-Sneddon, G; Bonner, L; Bruce, V

2001-10-01

Young children perform difficult communication tasks better face to face than when they cannot see one another (e.g., Doherty-Sneddon & Kent, 1996). However, in recent studies, it was found that children aged 6 and 10 years, describing abstract shapes, showed evidence of face-to-face interference rather than facilitation. For some communication tasks, access to visual signals (such as facial expression and eye gaze) may hinder rather than help children's communication. In new research we have pursued this interference effect. Five studies are described with adults and 10- and 6-year-old participants. It was found that looking at a face interfered with children's abilities to listen to descriptions of abstract shapes. Children also performed visuospatial memory tasks worse when they looked at someone's face prior to responding than when they looked at a visuospatial pattern or at the floor. It was concluded that performance on certain tasks was hindered by monitoring another person's face. It is suggested that processing of visual communication signals shares certain processing resources with the processing of other visuospatial information.

Detecting superior face recognition skills in a large sample of young British adults

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Anna Katarzyna Bobak

2016-09-01

Full Text Available The Cambridge Face Memory Test Long Form (CFMT+ and Cambridge Face Perception Test (CFPT are typically used to assess the face processing ability of individuals who believe they have superior face recognition skills. Previous large-scale studies have presented norms for the CFPT but not the CFMT+. However, previous research has also highlighted the necessity for establishing country-specific norms for these tests, indicating that norming data is required for both tests using young British adults. The current study addressed this issue in 254 British participants. In addition to providing the first norm for performance on the CFMT+ in any large sample, we also report the first UK specific cut-off for superior face recognition on the CFPT. Further analyses identified a small advantage for females on both tests, and only small associations between objective face recognition skills and self-report measures. A secondary aim of the study was to examine the relationship between trait or social anxiety and face processing ability, and no associations were noted. The implications of these findings for the classification of super-recognisers are discussed.

The importance of surface-based cues for face discrimination in non-human primates.

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Parr, Lisa A; Taubert, Jessica

2011-07-07

Understanding how individual identity is processed from faces remains a complex problem. Contrast reversal, showing faces in photographic negative, impairs face recognition in humans and demonstrates the importance of surface-based information (shading and pigmentation) in face recognition. We tested the importance of contrast information for face encoding in chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys using a computerized face-matching task. Results showed that contrast reversal (positive to negative) selectively impaired face processing in these two species, although the impairment was greater for chimpanzees. Unlike chimpanzees, however, monkeys performed just as well matching negative to positive faces, suggesting that they retained some ability to extract identity information from negative faces. A control task showed that chimpanzees, but not rhesus monkeys, performed significantly better matching face parts compared with whole faces after a contrast reversal, suggesting that contrast reversal acts selectively on face processing, rather than general visual-processing mechanisms. These results confirm the importance of surface-based cues for face processing in chimpanzees and humans, while the results were less salient for rhesus monkeys. These findings make a significant contribution to understanding the evolution of cognitive specializations for face processing among primates, and suggest potential differences between monkeys and apes.

Word and face processing engage overlapping distributed networks: Evidence from RSVP and EEG investigations.

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Robinson, Amanda K; Plaut, David C; Behrmann, Marlene

2017-07-01

Words and faces have vastly different visual properties, but increasing evidence suggests that word and face processing engage overlapping distributed networks. For instance, fMRI studies have shown overlapping activity for face and word processing in the fusiform gyrus despite well-characterized lateralization of these objects to the left and right hemispheres, respectively. To investigate whether face and word perception influences perception of the other stimulus class and elucidate the mechanisms underlying such interactions, we presented images using rapid serial visual presentations. Across 3 experiments, participants discriminated 2 face, word, and glasses targets (T1 and T2) embedded in a stream of images. As expected, T2 discrimination was impaired when it followed T1 by 200 to 300 ms relative to longer intertarget lags, the so-called attentional blink. Interestingly, T2 discrimination accuracy was significantly reduced at short intertarget lags when a face was followed by a word (face-word) compared with glasses-word and word-word combinations, indicating that face processing interfered with word perception. The reverse effect was not observed; that is, word-face performance was no different than the other object combinations. EEG results indicated the left N170 to T1 was correlated with the word decrement for face-word trials, but not for other object combinations. Taken together, the results suggest face processing interferes with word processing, providing evidence for overlapping neural mechanisms of these 2 object types. Furthermore, asymmetrical face-word interference points to greater overlap of face and word representations in the left than the right hemisphere. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

How holistic processing of faces relates to cognitive control and intelligence.

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Gauthier, Isabel; Chua, Kao-Wei; Richler, Jennifer J

2018-04-16

The Vanderbilt Holistic Processing Test for faces (VHPT-F) is the first standard test designed to measure individual differences in holistic processing. The test measures failures of selective attention to face parts through congruency effects, an operational definition of holistic processing. However, this conception of holistic processing has been challenged by the suggestion that it may tap into the same selective attention or cognitive control mechanisms that yield congruency effects in Stroop and Flanker paradigms. Here, we report data from 130 subjects on the VHPT-F, several versions of Stroop and Flanker tasks, as well as fluid IQ. Results suggested a small degree of shared variance in Stroop and Flanker congruency effects, which did not relate to congruency effects on the VHPT-F. Variability on the VHPT-F was also not correlated with Fluid IQ. In sum, we find no evidence that holistic face processing as measured by congruency in the VHPT-F is accounted for by domain-general control mechanisms.

The effect of real-world personal familiarity on the speed of face information processing.

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Benjamin Balas

2007-11-01

Full Text Available Previous studies have explored the effects of familiarity on various kinds of visual face judgments, yet the role of familiarity in face processing is not fully understood. Across different face judgments and stimulus sets, the data is equivocal as to whether or not familiarity impacts recognition processes.Here, we examine the effect of real-world personal familiarity in three simple delayed-match-to-sample tasks in which subjects were required to match faces on the basis of orientation (upright v. inverted, gender and identity. We find that subjects had a significant speed advantage with familiar faces in all three tasks, with large effects for the gender and identity matching tasks.Our data indicates that real-world experience with a face exerts a powerful influence on face processing in tasks where identity information is irrelevant, even in tasks that could in principle be solved via low-level cues. These results underscore the importance of experience in shaping visual recognition processes.

Neurocognitive mechanisms of gaze-expression interactions in face processing and social attention.

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Graham, Reiko; Labar, Kevin S

2012-04-01

The face conveys a rich source of non-verbal information used during social communication. While research has revealed how specific facial channels such as emotional expression are processed, little is known about the prioritization and integration of multiple cues in the face during dyadic exchanges. Classic models of face perception have emphasized the segregation of dynamic vs. static facial features along independent information processing pathways. Here we review recent behavioral and neuroscientific evidence suggesting that within the dynamic stream, concurrent changes in eye gaze and emotional expression can yield early independent effects on face judgments and covert shifts of visuospatial attention. These effects are partially segregated within initial visual afferent processing volleys, but are subsequently integrated in limbic regions such as the amygdala or via reentrant visual processing volleys. This spatiotemporal pattern may help to resolve otherwise perplexing discrepancies across behavioral studies of emotional influences on gaze-directed attentional cueing. Theoretical explanations of gaze-expression interactions are discussed, with special consideration of speed-of-processing (discriminability) and contextual (ambiguity) accounts. Future research in this area promises to reveal the mental chronometry of face processing and interpersonal attention, with implications for understanding how social referencing develops in infancy and is impaired in autism and other disorders of social cognition. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Emotionally anesthetized: media violence induces neural changes during emotional face processing.

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Stockdale, Laura A; Morrison, Robert G; Kmiecik, Matthew J; Garbarino, James; Silton, Rebecca L

2015-10-01

Media violence exposure causes increased aggression and decreased prosocial behavior, suggesting that media violence desensitizes people to the emotional experience of others. Alterations in emotional face processing following exposure to media violence may result in desensitization to others' emotional states. This study used scalp electroencephalography methods to examine the link between exposure to violence and neural changes associated with emotional face processing. Twenty-five participants were shown a violent or nonviolent film clip and then completed a gender discrimination stop-signal task using emotional faces. Media violence did not affect the early visual P100 component; however, decreased amplitude was observed in the N170 and P200 event-related potentials following the violent film, indicating that exposure to film violence leads to suppression of holistic face processing and implicit emotional processing. Participants who had just seen a violent film showed increased frontal N200/P300 amplitude. These results suggest that media violence exposure may desensitize people to emotional stimuli and thereby require fewer cognitive resources to inhibit behavior. © The Author (2015). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Fluent conceptual processing and explicit memory for faces are electrophysiologically distinct.

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Voss, Joel L; Paller, Ken A

2006-01-18

Implicit memory and explicit memory are fundamentally different manifestations of memory storage in the brain. Yet, conceptual fluency driven by previous experience could theoretically be responsible for both conceptual implicit memory and aspects of explicit memory. For example, contemplating the meaning of a word might serve to speed subsequent processing of that word and also make it seem familiar. We examined electrophysiological correlates of conceptual priming with 180 celebrity faces to determine whether or not they resemble electrophysiological correlates of explicit memory. Celebrity faces are ideal for this purpose because they carry with them preexisting conceptual information (i.e., biographical facts) that can selectively be brought to mind such that conceptual processing can be manipulated systematically. In our experiment, exposure to biographical information associated with only one-half of the celebrities yielded conceptual priming for those faces, whereas all faces were perceptually primed. Conceptual priming was indexed by positive brain potentials over frontal regions from approximately 250 to 500 ms. Explicit memory retrieval was associated with later brain potentials over posterior regions that were strikingly similar to potentials previously associated with pure familiarity for faces (when a face seems familiar in the absence of retrieval of any specific information about previous occurrence). Furthermore, the magnitude of conceptual priming was correlated across subjects with the amplitude of frontal but not posterior potentials, whereas the opposite was true for explicit memory. Distinct brain processes were thus associated with conceptual priming and conscious recognition of faces, thus providing a sharper focus on the border between implicit and explicit memory.

When noise is beneficial for sensory encoding: Noise adaptation can improve face processing.

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Menzel, Claudia; Hayn-Leichsenring, Gregor U; Redies, Christoph; Németh, Kornél; Kovács, Gyula

2017-10-01

The presence of noise usually impairs the processing of a stimulus. Here, we studied the effects of noise on face processing and show, for the first time, that adaptation to noise patterns has beneficial effects on face perception. We used noiseless faces that were either surrounded by random noise or presented on a uniform background as stimuli. In addition, the faces were either preceded by noise adaptors or not. Moreover, we varied the statistics of the noise so that its spectral slope either matched that of the faces or it was steeper or shallower. Results of parallel ERP recordings showed that the background noise reduces the amplitude of the face-evoked N170, indicating less intensive face processing. Adaptation to a noise pattern, however, led to reduced P1 and enhanced N170 amplitudes as well as to a better behavioral performance in two of the three noise conditions. This effect was also augmented by the presence of background noise around the target stimuli. Additionally, the spectral slope of the noise pattern affected the size of the P1, N170 and P2 amplitudes. We reason that the observed effects are due to the selective adaptation of noise-sensitive neurons present in the face-processing cortical areas, which may enhance the signal-to-noise-ratio. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Teacher Training in a Synchronous Cyber Face-to-Face Classroom: Characterizing and Supporting the Online Teachers' Learning Process

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Wang, Yuping; Chen, Nian-Shing; Levy, Mike

2010-01-01

This article discusses the learning process undertaken by language teachers in a cyber face-to-face teacher training program. Eight tertiary Chinese language teachers attended a 12-week training program conducted in an online synchronous learning environment characterized by multimedia-based, oral and visual interaction. The term "cyber…

Emotionally anesthetized: media violence induces neural changes during emotional face processing

OpenAIRE

Stockdale, Laura A.; Morrison, Robert G.; Kmiecik, Matthew J.; Garbarino, James; Silton, Rebecca L.

2015-01-01

Media violence exposure causes increased aggression and decreased prosocial behavior, suggesting that media violence desensitizes people to the emotional experience of others. Alterations in emotional face processing following exposure to media violence may result in desensitization to others’ emotional states. This study used scalp electroencephalography methods to examine the link between exposure to violence and neural changes associated with emotional face processing. Twenty-five particip...

The Impact of Top-Down Prediction on Emotional Face Processing in Social Anxiety

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Guangming Ran

2017-07-01

Full Text Available There is evidence that people with social anxiety show abnormal processing of emotional faces. To investigate the impact of top-down prediction on emotional face processing in social anxiety, brain responses of participants with high and low social anxiety (LSA were recorded, while they performed a variation of the emotional task, using high temporal resolution event-related potential techniques. Behaviorally, we reported an effect of prediction with higher accuracy for predictable than unpredictable faces. Furthermore, we found that participants with high social anxiety (HSA, but not with LSA, recognized angry faces more accurately than happy faces. For the P100 and P200 components, HSA participants showed enhanced brain activity for angry faces compared to happy faces, suggesting a hypervigilance to angry faces. Importantly, HSA participants exhibited larger N170 amplitudes in the right hemisphere electrodes than LSA participants when they observed unpredictable angry faces, but not when the angry faces were predictable. This probably reflects the top-down prediction improving the deficiency at building a holistic face representation in HSA participants.

Does facial processing prioritize change detection?: change blindness illustrates costs and benefits of holistic processing.

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Wilford, Miko M; Wells, Gary L

2010-11-01

There is broad consensus among researchers both that faces are processed more holistically than other objects and that this type of processing is beneficial. We predicted that holistic processing of faces also involves a cost, namely, a diminished ability to localize change. This study (N = 150) utilized a modified change-blindness paradigm in which some trials involved a change in one feature of an image (nose, chin, mouth, hair, or eyes for faces; chimney, porch, window, roof, or door for houses), whereas other trials involved no change. People were better able to detect the occurrence of a change for faces than for houses, but were better able to localize which feature had changed for houses than for faces. Half the trials used inverted images, a manipulation that disrupts holistic processing. With inverted images, the critical interaction between image type (faces vs. houses) and task (change detection vs. change localization) disappeared. The results suggest that holistic processing reduces change-localization abilities.

Are patients with schizophrenia impaired in processing non-emotional features of human faces?

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Hayley eDarke

2013-08-01

Full Text Available It is known that individuals with schizophrenia exhibit signs of impaired face processing, however, the exact perceptual and cognitive mechanisms underlying these deficits are yet to be elucidated. One possible source of confusion in the current literature is the methodological and conceptual inconsistencies that can arise from the varied treatment of different aspects of face processing relating to emotional and non-emotional aspects of face perception. This review aims to disentangle the literature by focusing on the performance of patients with schizophrenia in a range of tasks that required processing of non-emotional features of face stimuli (e.g. identity or gender. We also consider the performance of patients on non-face stimuli that share common elements such as familiarity (e.g. cars and social relevance (e.g. gait. We conclude by exploring whether observed deficits are best considered as face-specific and note that further investigation is required to properly assess the potential contribution of more generalised attentional or perceptual impairments.

Visual attention to dynamic faces and objects is linked to face processing skills: A combined study of children with autism and controls

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Julia eParish-Morris

2013-04-01

Full Text Available Although the extant literature on face recognition skills in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD shows clear impairments compared to typically developing controls (TDC at the group level, the distribution of scores within ASD is broad. In the present research, we take a dimensional approach and explore how differences in social attention during an eye tracking experiment correlate with face recognition skills across ASD and TDC. Emotional discrimination and person identity perception face processing skills were assessed using the Let’s Face It! Skills Battery in 110 children with and without ASD. Social attention was assessed using infrared eye gaze tracking during passive viewing of movies of facial expressions and objects displayed together on a computer screen. Face processing skills were significantly correlated with measures of attention to faces and with social skills as measured by the Social Communication Questionnaire. Consistent with prior research, children with ASD scored significantly lower on face processing skills tests but, unexpectedly, group differences in amount of attention to faces (versus objects were not found. We discuss possible methodological contributions to this null finding. We also highlight the importance of a dimensional approach for understanding the developmental origins of reduced face perception skills, and emphasize the need for longitudinal research to truly understand how social motivation and social attention influence the development of social perceptual skills.

A novel BCI based on ERP components sensitive to configural processing of human faces

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Zhang, Yu; Zhao, Qibin; Jing, Jin; Wang, Xingyu; Cichocki, Andrzej

2012-04-01

This study introduces a novel brain-computer interface (BCI) based on an oddball paradigm using stimuli of facial images with loss of configural face information (e.g., inversion of face). To the best of our knowledge, till now the configural processing of human faces has not been applied to BCI but widely studied in cognitive neuroscience research. Our experiments confirm that the face-sensitive event-related potential (ERP) components N170 and vertex positive potential (VPP) have reflected early structural encoding of faces and can be modulated by the configural processing of faces. With the proposed novel paradigm, we investigate the effects of ERP components N170, VPP and P300 on target detection for BCI. An eight-class BCI platform is developed to analyze ERPs and evaluate the target detection performance using linear discriminant analysis without complicated feature extraction processing. The online classification accuracy of 88.7% and information transfer rate of 38.7 bits min-1 using stimuli of inverted faces with only single trial suggest that the proposed paradigm based on the configural processing of faces is very promising for visual stimuli-driven BCI applications.

An in-depth cognitive examination of individuals with superior face recognition skills.

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Bobak, Anna K; Bennetts, Rachel J; Parris, Benjamin A; Jansari, Ashok; Bate, Sarah

2016-09-01

Previous work has reported the existence of "super-recognisers" (SRs), or individuals with extraordinary face recognition skills. However, the precise underpinnings of this ability have not yet been investigated. In this paper we examine (a) the face-specificity of super recognition, (b) perception of facial identity in SRs, (c) whether SRs present with enhancements in holistic processing and (d) the consistency of these findings across different SRs. A detailed neuropsychological investigation into six SRs indicated domain-specificity in three participants, with some evidence of enhanced generalised visuo-cognitive or socio-emotional processes in the remaining individuals. While superior face-processing skills were restricted to face memory in three of the SRs, enhancements to facial identity perception were observed in the others. Notably, five of the six participants showed at least some evidence of enhanced holistic processing. These findings indicate cognitive heterogeneity in the presentation of superior face recognition, and have implications for our theoretical understanding of the typical face-processing system and the identification of superior face-processing skills in applied settings. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The electrophysiological effects of the serotonin 1A receptor agonist buspirone in emotional face processing.

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Bernasconi, Fosco; Kometer, Michael; Pokorny, Thomas; Seifritz, Erich; Vollenweider, Franz X

2015-04-01

Emotional face processing is critically modulated by the serotonergic system, and serotonin (5-HT) receptor agonists impair emotional face processing. However, the specific contribution of the 5-HT1A receptor remains poorly understood. Here we investigated the spatiotemporal brain mechanisms underpinning the modulation of emotional face processing induced by buspirone, a partial 5-HT1A receptor agonist. In a psychophysical discrimination of emotional faces task, we observed that the discrimination fearful versus neutral faces were reduced, but not happy versus neutral faces. Electrical neuroimaging analyses were applied to visual evoked potentials elicited by emotional face images, after placebo and buspirone administration. Buspirone modulated response strength (i.e., global field power) in the interval 230-248ms after stimulus onset. Distributed source estimation over this time interval revealed that buspirone decreased the neural activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that was evoked by fearful faces. These results indicate temporal and valence-specific effects of buspirone on the neuronal correlates of emotional face processing. Furthermore, the reduced neural activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in response to fearful faces suggests a reduced attention to fearful faces. Collectively, these findings provide new insights into the role of 5-HT1A receptors in emotional face processing and have implications for affective disorders that are characterized by an increased attention to negative stimuli. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. and ECNP. All rights reserved.

Self-esteem Modulates the P3 Component in Response to the Self-face Processing after Priming with Emotional Faces.

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Guan, Lili; Zhao, Yufang; Wang, Yige; Chen, Yujie; Yang, Juan

2017-01-01

The self-face processing advantage (SPA) refers to the research finding that individuals generally recognize their own face faster than another's face; self-face also elicits an enhanced P3 amplitude compared to another's face. It has been suggested that social evaluation threats could weaken the SPA and that self-esteem could be regarded as a threat buffer. However, little research has directly investigated the neural evidence of how self-esteem modulates the social evaluation threat to the SPA. In the current event-related potential study, 27 healthy Chinese undergraduate students were primed with emotional faces (angry, happy, or neutral) and were asked to judge whether the target face (self, friend, and stranger) was familiar or unfamiliar. Electrophysiological results showed that after priming with emotional faces (angry and happy), self-face elicited similar P3 amplitudes to friend-face in individuals with low self-esteem, but not in individuals with high self-esteem. The results suggest that as low self-esteem raises fears of social rejection and exclusion, priming with emotional faces (angry and happy) can weaken the SPA in low self-esteem individuals but not in high self-esteem individuals.

Self-esteem Modulates the P3 Component in Response to the Self-face Processing after Priming with Emotional Faces

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Lili Guan

2017-08-01

Full Text Available The self-face processing advantage (SPA refers to the research finding that individuals generally recognize their own face faster than another’s face; self-face also elicits an enhanced P3 amplitude compared to another’s face. It has been suggested that social evaluation threats could weaken the SPA and that self-esteem could be regarded as a threat buffer. However, little research has directly investigated the neural evidence of how self-esteem modulates the social evaluation threat to the SPA. In the current event-related potential study, 27 healthy Chinese undergraduate students were primed with emotional faces (angry, happy, or neutral and were asked to judge whether the target face (self, friend, and stranger was familiar or unfamiliar. Electrophysiological results showed that after priming with emotional faces (angry and happy, self-face elicited similar P3 amplitudes to friend-face in individuals with low self-esteem, but not in individuals with high self-esteem. The results suggest that as low self-esteem raises fears of social rejection and exclusion, priming with emotional faces (angry and happy can weaken the SPA in low self-esteem individuals but not in high self-esteem individuals.

A reciprocal model of face recognition and autistic traits: evidence from an individual differences perspective.

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Halliday, Drew W R; MacDonald, Stuart W S; Scherf, K Suzanne; Sherf, Suzanne K; Tanaka, James W

2014-01-01

Although not a core symptom of the disorder, individuals with autism often exhibit selective impairments in their face processing abilities. Importantly, the reciprocal connection between autistic traits and face perception has rarely been examined within the typically developing population. In this study, university participants from the social sciences, physical sciences, and humanities completed a battery of measures that assessed face, object and emotion recognition abilities, general perceptual-cognitive style, and sub-clinical autistic traits (the Autism Quotient (AQ)). We employed separate hierarchical multiple regression analyses to evaluate which factors could predict face recognition scores and AQ scores. Gender, object recognition performance, and AQ scores predicted face recognition behaviour. Specifically, males, individuals with more autistic traits, and those with lower object recognition scores performed more poorly on the face recognition test. Conversely, university major, gender and face recognition performance reliably predicted AQ scores. Science majors, males, and individuals with poor face recognition skills showed more autistic-like traits. These results suggest that the broader autism phenotype is associated with lower face recognition abilities, even among typically developing individuals.

Emotional Faces Capture Spatial Attention in 5-Year-Old Children

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Kit K. Elam

2010-10-01

Full Text Available Emotional facial expressions are important social cues that convey salient affective information. Infants, younger children, and adults all appear to orient spatial attention to emotional faces with a particularly strong bias to fearful faces. Yet in young children it is unclear whether or not both happy and fearful faces extract attention. Given that the processing of emotional faces is believed by some to serve an evolutionarily adaptive purpose, attentional biases to both fearful and happy expressions would be expected in younger children. However, the extent to which this ability is present in young children and whether or not this ability is genetically mediated is untested. Therefore, the aims of the current study were to assess the spatial-attentional properties of emotional faces in young children, with a preliminary test of whether this effect was influenced by genetics. Five-year-old twin pairs performed a dot-probe task. The results suggest that children preferentially direct spatial attention to emotional faces, particularly right visual field faces. The results provide support for the notion that the direction of spatial attention to emotional faces serves an evolutionarily adaptive function and may be mediated by genetic mechanisms.

A Study on Improving Information Processing Abilities Based on PBL

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Kim, Du Gyu; Lee, JaeMu

2014-01-01

This study examined an instruction method for the improvement of information processing abilities in elementary school students. Current elementary students are required to develop information processing abilities to create new knowledge for this digital age. There is, however, a shortage of instruction strategies for these information processing…

The recognition of emotional expression in prosopagnosia: decoding whole and part faces.

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Stephan, Blossom Christa Maree; Breen, Nora; Caine, Diana

2006-11-01

Prosopagnosia is currently viewed within the constraints of two competing theories of face recognition, one highlighting the analysis of features, the other focusing on configural processing of the whole face. This study investigated the role of feature analysis versus whole face configural processing in the recognition of facial expression. A prosopagnosic patient, SC made expression decisions from whole and incomplete (eyes-only and mouth-only) faces where features had been obscured. SC was impaired at recognizing some (e.g., anger, sadness, and fear), but not all (e.g., happiness) emotional expressions from the whole face. Analyses of his performance on incomplete faces indicated that his recognition of some expressions actually improved relative to his performance on the whole face condition. We argue that in SC interference from damaged configural processes seem to override an intact ability to utilize part-based or local feature cues.

The effect of emotionally valenced eye region images on visuocortical processing of surprised faces.

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Li, Shuaixia; Li, Ping; Wang, Wei; Zhu, Xiangru; Luo, Wenbo

2018-05-01

In this study, we presented pictorial representations of happy, neutral, and fearful expressions projected in the eye regions to determine whether the eye region alone is sufficient to produce a context effect. Participants were asked to judge the valence of surprised faces that had been preceded by a picture of an eye region. Behavioral results showed that affective ratings of surprised faces were context dependent. Prime-related ERPs with presentation of happy eyes elicited a larger P1 than those for neutral and fearful eyes, likely due to the recognition advantage provided by a happy expression. Target-related ERPs showed that surprised faces in the context of fearful and happy eyes elicited dramatically larger C1 than those in the neutral context, which reflected the modulation by predictions during the earliest stages of face processing. There were larger N170 with neutral and fearful eye contexts compared to the happy context, suggesting faces were being integrated with contextual threat information. The P3 component exhibited enhanced brain activity in response to faces preceded by happy and fearful eyes compared with neutral eyes, indicating motivated attention processing may be involved at this stage. Altogether, these results indicate for the first time that the influence of isolated eye regions on the perception of surprised faces involves preferential processing at the early stages and elaborate processing at the late stages. Moreover, higher cognitive processes such as predictions and attention can modulate face processing from the earliest stages in a top-down manner. © 2017 Society for Psychophysiological Research.

ERP evidence for own-age effects on late stages of processing sad faces.

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Fölster, Mara; Werheid, Katja

2016-08-01

Faces convey important information on interaction partners, such as their emotional state and age. Faces of the same age are, according to recent research, preferentially processed. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the neural processes underlying this own-age effect are influenced by the emotional expression of the face, and to explore possible explanations such as the frequency or quality of contact to own-age versus other-age groups. Event-related potentials were recorded while 19 younger (18-30 years) and 19 older (64-86 years) observers watched younger and older sad and happy faces. Sad but not happy faces elicited higher late positive potential amplitudes for own-age than for other-age faces. This own-age effect was significant for older, but not for younger, observers, and correlated with the quality of contact with the own-age versus the other-age group. This pattern suggests that sad own-age faces are motivationally more relevant.

Testing Differential Holistic Processing Within a Face: No Evidence of Asymmetry from the Complete Composite Task.

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Shyi, Gary C-W; Wang, Chao-Chih

2016-01-01

The composite face task is one of the most popular research paradigms for measuring holistic processing of upright faces. The exact mechanism underlying holistic processing remains elusive and controversial, and some studies have suggested that holistic processing may not be evenly distributed, in that the top-half of a face might induce stronger holistic processing than its bottom-half counterpart. In two experiments, we further examined the possibility of asymmetric holistic processing. Prior to Experiment 1, we confirmed that perceptual discriminability was equated between top and bottom face halves; we found no differences in performance between top and bottom face halves when they were presented individually. Then, in Experiment 1, using the composite face task with the complete design to reduce response bias, we failed to obtain evidence that would support the notion of asymmetric holistic processing between top and bottom face halves. To further reduce performance variability and to remove lingering holistic effects observed in the misaligned condition in Experiment 1, we doubled the number of trials and increased misalignment between top and bottom face halves to make misalignment more salient in Experiment 2. Even with these additional manipulations, we were unable to find evidence indicative of asymmetric holistic processing. Taken together, these findings suggest that holistic processing is distributed homogenously within an upright face.

Source Reconstruction of Brain Potentials Using Bayesian Model Averaging to Analyze Face Intra-Domain vs. Face-Occupation Cross-Domain Processing.

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Olivares, Ela I; Lage-Castellanos, Agustín; Bobes, María A; Iglesias, Jaime

2018-01-01

We investigated the neural correlates of the access to and retrieval of face structure information in contrast to those concerning the access to and retrieval of person-related verbal information, triggered by faces. We experimentally induced stimulus familiarity via a systematic learning procedure including faces with and without associated verbal information. Then, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in both intra-domain (face-feature) and cross-domain (face-occupation) matching tasks while N400-like responses were elicited by incorrect eyes-eyebrows completions and occupations, respectively. A novel Bayesian source reconstruction approach plus conjunction analysis of group effects revealed that in both cases the generated N170s were of similar amplitude but had different neural origin. Thus, whereas the N170 of faces was associated predominantly to right fusiform and occipital regions (the so-called "Fusiform Face Area", "FFA" and "Occipital Face Area", "OFA", respectively), the N170 of occupations was associated to a bilateral very posterior activity, suggestive of basic perceptual processes. Importantly, the right-sided perceptual P200 and the face-related N250 were evoked exclusively in the intra-domain task, with sources in OFA and extensively in the fusiform region, respectively. Regarding later latencies, the intra-domain N400 seemed to be generated in right posterior brain regions encompassing mainly OFA and, to some extent, the FFA, likely reflecting neural operations triggered by structural incongruities. In turn, the cross-domain N400 was related to more anterior left-sided fusiform and temporal inferior sources, paralleling those described previously for the classic verbal N400. These results support the existence of differentiated neural streams for face structure and person-related verbal processing triggered by faces, which can be activated differentially according to specific task demands.

Source Reconstruction of Brain Potentials Using Bayesian Model Averaging to Analyze Face Intra-Domain vs. Face-Occupation Cross-Domain Processing

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Ela I. Olivares

2018-03-01

Full Text Available We investigated the neural correlates of the access to and retrieval of face structure information in contrast to those concerning the access to and retrieval of person-related verbal information, triggered by faces. We experimentally induced stimulus familiarity via a systematic learning procedure including faces with and without associated verbal information. Then, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs in both intra-domain (face-feature and cross-domain (face-occupation matching tasks while N400-like responses were elicited by incorrect eyes-eyebrows completions and occupations, respectively. A novel Bayesian source reconstruction approach plus conjunction analysis of group effects revealed that in both cases the generated N170s were of similar amplitude but had different neural origin. Thus, whereas the N170 of faces was associated predominantly to right fusiform and occipital regions (the so-called “Fusiform Face Area”, “FFA” and “Occipital Face Area”, “OFA”, respectively, the N170 of occupations was associated to a bilateral very posterior activity, suggestive of basic perceptual processes. Importantly, the right-sided perceptual P200 and the face-related N250 were evoked exclusively in the intra-domain task, with sources in OFA and extensively in the fusiform region, respectively. Regarding later latencies, the intra-domain N400 seemed to be generated in right posterior brain regions encompassing mainly OFA and, to some extent, the FFA, likely reflecting neural operations triggered by structural incongruities. In turn, the cross-domain N400 was related to more anterior left-sided fusiform and temporal inferior sources, paralleling those described previously for the classic verbal N400. These results support the existence of differentiated neural streams for face structure and person-related verbal processing triggered by faces, which can be activated differentially according to specific task demands.

Interactions between facial emotion and identity in face processing: evidence based on redundancy gains.

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Yankouskaya, Alla; Booth, David A; Humphreys, Glyn

2012-11-01

Interactions between the processing of emotion expression and form-based information from faces (facial identity) were investigated using the redundant-target paradigm, in which we specifically tested whether identity and emotional expression are integrated in a superadditive manner (Miller, Cognitive Psychology 14:247-279, 1982). In Experiments 1 and 2, participants performed emotion and face identity judgments on faces with sad or angry emotional expressions. Responses to redundant targets were faster than responses to either single target when a universal emotion was conveyed, and performance violated the predictions from a model assuming independent processing of emotion and face identity. Experiment 4 showed that these effects were not modulated by varying interstimulus and nontarget contingencies, and Experiment 5 demonstrated that the redundancy gains were eliminated when faces were inverted. Taken together, these results suggest that the identification of emotion and facial identity interact in face processing.

Reading faces and Facing words

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Robotham, Julia Emma; Lindegaard, Martin Weis; Delfi, Tzvetelina Shentova

unilateral lesions, we found no patient with a selective deficit in either reading or face processing. Rather, the patients showing a deficit in processing either words or faces were also impaired with the other category. One patient performed within the normal range on all tasks. In addition, all patients......It has long been argued that perceptual processing of faces and words is largely independent, highly specialised and strongly lateralised. Studies of patients with either pure alexia or prosopagnosia have strongly contributed to this view. The aim of our study was to investigate how visual...... perception of faces and words is affected by unilateral posterior stroke. Two patients with lesions in their dominant hemisphere and two with lesions in their non-dominant hemisphere were tested on sensitive tests of face and word perception during the stable phase of recovery. Despite all patients having...

System Analysis of Flat Grinding Process with Wheel Face

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T. N. Ivanova

2014-01-01

Full Text Available The paper presents a conducted system analysis of the flat grinding wheel face, considers the state parameters, input and output variables of subsystems, namely: machine tool, workpiece, grinding wheel, cutting fluids, and the contact area. It reveals the factors influencing the temperature and power conditions for the grinding process.Aim: conducting the system analysis of the flat grinding process with wheel face expects to enable a development of the system of grinding process parameters as a technical system, which will make it possible to evaluate each parameter individually and implement optimization of the entire system.One of the most important criteria in defining the optimal process conditions is the grinding temperature, which, to avoid defects appearance of on the surface of component, should not exceed the critical temperature values to be experimentally determined. The temperature criterion can be useful for choosing the conditions for the maximum defect-free performance of the mechanical face grinding. To define the maximum performance of defect-free grinding can also use other criteria such as a critical power density, indirectly reflecting the allowable thermal stress grinding process; the structure of the ground surface, which reflects the presence or absence of a defect layer, which is determined after the large number of experiments; flow range of the diamond layer.Optimal conditions should not exceed those of defect-free grinding. It is found that a maximum performance depends on the characteristics of circles and grade of processed material, as well as on the contact area and grinding conditions. Optimal performance depends on the diamond value (cost and specific consumption of diamonds in a circle.Above criteria require formalization as a function of the variable parameters of the grinding process. There is an option for the compromise of inter-criteria optimality, thereby providing a set of acceptable solutions, from

Face-selective regions differ in their ability to classify facial expressions.

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Zhang, Hui; Japee, Shruti; Nolan, Rachel; Chu, Carlton; Liu, Ning; Ungerleider, Leslie G

2016-04-15

Recognition of facial expressions is crucial for effective social interactions. Yet, the extent to which the various face-selective regions in the human brain classify different facial expressions remains unclear. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and support vector machine pattern classification analysis to determine how well face-selective brain regions are able to decode different categories of facial expression. Subjects participated in a slow event-related fMRI experiment in which they were shown 32 face pictures, portraying four different expressions: neutral, fearful, angry, and happy and belonging to eight different identities. Our results showed that only the amygdala and the posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) were able to accurately discriminate between these expressions, albeit in different ways: the amygdala discriminated fearful faces from non-fearful faces, whereas STS discriminated neutral from emotional (fearful, angry and happy) faces. In contrast to these findings on the classification of emotional expression, only the fusiform face area (FFA) and anterior inferior temporal cortex (aIT) could discriminate among the various facial identities. Further, the amygdala and STS were better than FFA and aIT at classifying expression, while FFA and aIT were better than the amygdala and STS at classifying identity. Taken together, our findings indicate that the decoding of facial emotion and facial identity occurs in different neural substrates: the amygdala and STS for the former and FFA and aIT for the latter. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Face Processing and Facial Emotion Recognition in Adults with Down Syndrome

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Barisnikov, Koviljka; Hippolyte, Loyse; Van der Linden, Martial

2008-01-01

Face processing and facial expression recognition was investigated in 17 adults with Down syndrome, and results were compared with those of a child control group matched for receptive vocabulary. On the tasks involving faces without emotional content, the adults with Down syndrome performed significantly worse than did the controls. However, their…

Bidirectional electric communication between the inferior occipital gyrus and the amygdala during face processing.

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Sato, Wataru; Kochiyama, Takanori; Uono, Shota; Matsuda, Kazumi; Usui, Keiko; Usui, Naotaka; Inoue, Yushi; Toichi, Motomi

2017-09-01

Faces contain multifaceted information that is important for human communication. Neuroimaging studies have revealed face-specific activation in multiple brain regions, including the inferior occipital gyrus (IOG) and amygdala; it is often assumed that these regions constitute the neural network responsible for the processing of faces. However, it remains unknown whether and how these brain regions transmit information during face processing. This study investigated these questions by applying dynamic causal modeling of induced responses to human intracranial electroencephalography data recorded from the IOG and amygdala during the observation of faces, mosaics, and houses in upright and inverted orientations. Model comparisons assessing the experimental effects of upright faces versus upright houses and upright faces versus upright mosaics consistently indicated that the model having face-specific bidirectional modulatory effects between the IOG and amygdala was the most probable. The experimental effect between upright versus inverted faces also favored the model with bidirectional modulatory effects between the IOG and amygdala. The spectral profiles of modulatory effects revealed both same-frequency (e.g., gamma-gamma) and cross-frequency (e.g., theta-gamma) couplings. These results suggest that the IOG and amygdala communicate rapidly with each other using various types of oscillations for the efficient processing of faces. Hum Brain Mapp 38:4511-4524, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Dynamics of processing invisible faces in the brain: automatic neural encoding of facial expression information.

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Jiang, Yi; Shannon, Robert W; Vizueta, Nathalie; Bernat, Edward M; Patrick, Christopher J; He, Sheng

2009-02-01

The fusiform face area (FFA) and the superior temporal sulcus (STS) are suggested to process facial identity and facial expression information respectively. We recently demonstrated a functional dissociation between the FFA and the STS as well as correlated sensitivity of the STS and the amygdala to facial expressions using an interocular suppression paradigm [Jiang, Y., He, S., 2006. Cortical responses to invisible faces: dissociating subsystems for facial-information processing. Curr. Biol. 16, 2023-2029.]. In the current event-related brain potential (ERP) study, we investigated the temporal dynamics of facial information processing. Observers viewed neutral, fearful, and scrambled face stimuli, either visibly or rendered invisible through interocular suppression. Relative to scrambled face stimuli, intact visible faces elicited larger positive P1 (110-130 ms) and larger negative N1 or N170 (160-180 ms) potentials at posterior occipital and bilateral occipito-temporal regions respectively, with the N170 amplitude significantly greater for fearful than neutral faces. Invisible intact faces generated a stronger signal than scrambled faces at 140-200 ms over posterior occipital areas whereas invisible fearful faces (compared to neutral and scrambled faces) elicited a significantly larger negative deflection starting at 220 ms along the STS. These results provide further evidence for cortical processing of facial information without awareness and elucidate the temporal sequence of automatic facial expression information extraction.

Personal familiarity influences the processing of upright and inverted faces in infants

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Benjamin J Balas

2010-02-01

Full Text Available Infant face processing becomes more selective during the first year of life as a function of varying experience with distinct face categories defined by species, race, and age. Given that any individual face belongs to many such categories (e.g. A young Caucasian man’s face we asked how the neural selectivity for one aspect of facial appearance was affected by category membership along another dimension of variability. 6-month-old infants were shown upright and inverted pictures of either their own mother or a stranger while event-related potentials (ERPs were recorded. We found that the amplitude of the P400 (a face-sensitive ERP component was only sensitive to the orientation of the mother’s face, suggesting that “tuning” of the neural response to faces is realized jointly across multiple dimensions of face appearance. .

An own-age bias in recognizing faces with horizontal information

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Andreas Schaich

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Horizontal information, as a result of a selective filtering process, are essential in younger adults’ (YA ability to recognize human faces. Obermeyer, Kolling, Schaich, and Knopf (2012 recently reported impaired recognition of faces with horizontal information in older adults (OA suggesting age-variant processing. Two yet unconsidered factors (stimulus age and exposure duration that may have influenced previous results, were investigated in this study. Forty-seven YA (18-35yrs and 49 OA (62-83yrs were tested in a 2x2x2x2 mixed design with the between-subjects factors age group (YA vs OA and stimulus age (young faces vs older faces and the within-subjects factors filter (filtered (HF faces vs unfiltered faces (UF and exposure duration (0.8s vs 8s. Subjects were presented morph videos between pairs of faces: A starting face gradually merged into either the previously encoded target face or a control face. As expected, results showed an increase in recognition sensitivity (d’ with longer exposure duration in YA with both younger and older HF faces. OA however were unable to recognize filtered young faces not even with increased exposure duration. Furthermore, only elderly participants showed more accurate recognition with faces of their own age relative to other-age faces (own-age bias, OAB. For YA no OAB was observed. Filtered face recognition was significantly correlated with unfiltered recognition in YA but not in OA. It is concluded, that processing of horizontal information changes at a higher age. Presenting filtered or unfiltered faces both targets convergent face-specific processing only in YA but not in OA.

Confronting an Old Enemy: Terrorism and the Changing Face of Military Intelligence

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Jones, Jack

2002-01-01

.... Existing cultural biases, stove-piped operational processes, and limited analyst recruitment problems have weakened the DOD intelligence community's ability to face the twenty-first century terrorist enemy...

Students' Ability to Solve Process-Diagram Problems in Secondary Biology Education

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Kragten, Marco; Admiraal, Wilfried; Rijlaarsdam, Gert

2015-01-01

Process diagrams are important tools in biology for explaining processes such as protein synthesis, compound cycles and the like. The aim of the present study was to measure the ability to solve process-diagram problems in biology and its relationship with prior knowledge, spatial ability and working memory. For this purpose, we developed a test…

The changing landscape of functional brain networks for face processing in typical development.

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Joseph, Jane E; Swearingen, Joshua E; Clark, Jonathan D; Benca, Chelsie E; Collins, Heather R; Corbly, Christine R; Gathers, Ann D; Bhatt, Ramesh S

2012-11-15

Greater expertise for faces in adults than in children may be achieved by a dynamic interplay of functional segregation and integration of brain regions throughout development. The present study examined developmental changes in face network functional connectivity in children (5-12 years) and adults (18-43 years) during face-viewing using a graph-theory approach. A face-specific developmental change involved connectivity of the right occipital face area. During childhood, this node increased in strength and within-module clustering based on positive connectivity. These changes reflect an important role of the ROFA in segregation of function during childhood. In addition, strength and diversity of connections within a module that included primary visual areas (left and right calcarine) and limbic regions (left hippocampus and right inferior orbitofrontal cortex) increased from childhood to adulthood, reflecting increased visuo-limbic integration. This integration was pronounced for faces but also emerged for natural objects. Taken together, the primary face-specific developmental changes involved segregation of a posterior visual module during childhood, possibly implicated in early stage perceptual face processing, and greater integration of visuo-limbic connections from childhood to adulthood, which may reflect processing related to development of perceptual expertise for individuation of faces and other visually homogenous categories. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Face Processing Improvements in Prosopagnosia: Successes and Failures over the last 50 years

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Joseph M Degutis

2014-08-01

Full Text Available Clinicians and researchers have widely believed that face processing cannot be improved in prosopagnosia. Though more than a dozen reported studies have attempted to enhance face processing in prosopagnosics over the last 50 years, evidence for effective treatment approaches has only begun to emerge. Here, we review the current literature on spontaneous recovery in acquired prosopagnosia (AP, as well as treatment attempts in acquired and developmental prosopagnosia (DP, differentiating between compensatory and remedial approaches. We find that for AP, rather than remedial methods, strategic compensatory training such as verbalizing distinctive facial features has shown to be the most effective approach (despite limited evidence of generalization. In children with DP, compensatory training has also shown some effectiveness. In adults with DP, two recent larger-scale studies, one using remedial training and another administering oxytocin, have demonstrated group-level improvements and evidence of generalization. These results suggest that DPs, perhaps because of their more intact face processing infrastructure, may benefit more from treatments targeting face processing than APs.

Parallel, multi-stage processing of colors, faces and shapes in macaque inferior temporal cortex

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Lafer-Sousa, Rosa; Conway, Bevil R.

2014-01-01

Visual-object processing culminates in inferior temporal (IT) cortex. To assess the organization of IT, we measured fMRI responses in alert monkey to achromatic images (faces, fruit, bodies, places) and colored gratings. IT contained multiple color-biased regions, which were typically ventral to face patches and, remarkably, yoked to them, spaced regularly at four locations predicted by known anatomy. Color and face selectivity increased for more anterior regions, indicative of a broad hierarchical arrangement. Responses to non-face shapes were found across IT, but were stronger outside color-biased regions and face patches, consistent with multiple parallel streams. IT also contained multiple coarse eccentricity maps: face patches overlapped central representations; color-biased regions spanned mid-peripheral representations; and place-biased regions overlapped peripheral representations. These results suggest that IT comprises parallel, multi-stage processing networks subject to one organizing principle. PMID:24141314

Asymmetric Engagement of Amygdala and Its Gamma Connectivity in Early Emotional Face Processing

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Liu, Tai-Ying; Chen, Yong-Sheng; Hsieh, Jen-Chuen; Chen, Li-Fen

2015-01-01

The amygdala has been regarded as a key substrate for emotion processing. However, the engagement of the left and right amygdala during the early perceptual processing of different emotional faces remains unclear. We investigated the temporal profiles of oscillatory gamma activity in the amygdala and effective connectivity of the amygdala with the thalamus and cortical areas during implicit emotion-perceptual tasks using event-related magnetoencephalography (MEG). We found that within 100 ms after stimulus onset the right amygdala habituated to emotional faces rapidly (with duration around 20–30 ms), whereas activity in the left amygdala (with duration around 50–60 ms) sustained longer than that in the right. Our data suggest that the right amygdala could be linked to autonomic arousal generated by facial emotions and the left amygdala might be involved in decoding or evaluating expressive faces in the early perceptual emotion processing. The results of effective connectivity provide evidence that only negative emotional processing engages both cortical and subcortical pathways connected to the right amygdala, representing its evolutional significance (survival). These findings demonstrate the asymmetric engagement of bilateral amygdala in emotional face processing as well as the capability of MEG for assessing thalamo-cortico-limbic circuitry. PMID:25629899

Testing the connections within face processing circuitry in Capgras delusion with diffusion imaging tractography

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Maria A. Bobes

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Although Capgras delusion (CD patients are capable of recognizing familiar faces, they present a delusional belief that some relatives have been replaced by impostors. CD has been explained as a selective disruption of a pathway processing affective values of familiar faces. To test the integrity of connections within face processing circuitry, diffusion tensor imaging was performed in a CD patient and 10 age-matched controls. Voxel-based morphometry indicated gray matter damage in right frontal areas. Tractography was used to examine two important tracts of the face processing circuitry: the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF and the inferior longitudinal (ILF. The superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF and commissural tracts were also assessed. CD patient did not differ from controls in the commissural fibers, or the SLF. Right and left ILF, and right IFOF were also equivalent to those of controls. However, the left IFOF was significantly reduced respect to controls, also showing a significant dissociation with the ILF, which represents a selective impairment in the fiber-tract connecting occipital and frontal areas. This suggests a possible involvement of the IFOF in affective processing of faces in typical observers and in covert recognition in some cases with prosopagnosia.

How inverse solver technologies can support die face development and process planning in the automotive industry

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Huhn, Stefan; Peeling, Derek; Burkart, Maximilian

2017-10-01

With the availability of die face design tools and incremental solver technologies to provide detailed forming feasibility results in a timely fashion, the use of inverse solver technologies and resulting process improvements during the product development process of stamped parts often is underestimated. This paper presents some applications of inverse technologies that are currently used in the automotive industry to streamline the product development process and greatly increase the quality of a developed process and the resulting product. The first focus is on the so-called target strain technology. Application examples will show how inverse forming analysis can be applied to support the process engineer during the development of a die face geometry for Class `A' panels. The drawing process is greatly affected by the die face design and the process designer has to ensure that the resulting drawn panel will meet specific requirements regarding surface quality and a minimum strain distribution to ensure dent resistance. The target strain technology provides almost immediate feedback to the process engineer during the die face design process if a specific change of the die face design will help to achieve these specific requirements or will be counterproductive. The paper will further show how an optimization of the material flow can be achieved through the use of a newly developed technology called Sculptured Die Face (SDF). The die face generation in SDF is more suited to be used in optimization loops than any other conventional die face design technology based on cross section design. A second focus in this paper is on the use of inverse solver technologies for secondary forming operations. The paper will show how the application of inverse technology can be used to accurately and quickly develop trim lines on simple as well as on complex support geometries.

Is that me or my twin? Lack of self-face recognition advantage in identical twins.

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Matteo Martini

Full Text Available Despite the increasing interest in twin studies and the stunning amount of research on face recognition, the ability of adult identical twins to discriminate their own faces from those of their co-twins has been scarcely investigated. One's own face is the most distinctive feature of the bodily self, and people typically show a clear advantage in recognizing their own face even more than other very familiar identities. Given the very high level of resemblance of their faces, monozygotic twins represent a unique model for exploring self-face processing. Herein we examined the ability of monozygotic twins to distinguish their own face from the face of their co-twin and of a highly familiar individual. Results show that twins equally recognize their own face and their twin's face. This lack of self-face advantage was negatively predicted by how much they felt physically similar to their co-twin and by their anxious or avoidant attachment style. We speculate that in monozygotic twins, the visual representation of the self-face overlaps with that of the co-twin. Thus, to distinguish the self from the co-twin, monozygotic twins have to rely much more than control participants on the multisensory integration processes upon which the sense of bodily self is based. Moreover, in keeping with the notion that attachment style influences perception of self and significant others, we propose that the observed self/co-twin confusion may depend upon insecure attachment.

Testing the effects of expression, intensity and age on emotional face processing in ASD.

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Luyster, Rhiannon J; Bick, Johanna; Westerlund, Alissa; Nelson, Charles A

2017-06-21

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) commonly show global deficits in the processing of facial emotion, including impairments in emotion recognition and slowed processing of emotional faces. Growing evidence has suggested that these challenges may increase with age, perhaps due to minimal improvement with age in individuals with ASD. In the present study, we explored the role of age, emotion type and emotion intensity in face processing for individuals with and without ASD. Twelve- and 18-22- year-old children with and without ASD participated. No significant diagnostic group differences were observed on behavioral measures of emotion processing for younger versus older individuals with and without ASD. However, there were significant group differences in neural responses to emotional faces. Relative to TD, at 12 years of age and during adulthood, individuals with ASD showed slower N170 to emotional faces. While the TD groups' P1 latency was significantly shorter in adults when compared to 12 year olds, there was no significant age-related difference in P1 latency among individuals with ASD. Findings point to potential differences in the maturation of cortical networks that support visual processing (whether of faces or stimuli more broadly), among individuals with and without ASD between late childhood and adulthood. Finally, associations between ERP amplitudes and behavioral responses on emotion processing tasks suggest possible neural markers for emotional and behavioral deficits among individuals with ASD. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Sensory competition in the face processing areas of the human brain.

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Krisztina Nagy

Full Text Available The concurrent presentation of multiple stimuli in the visual field may trigger mutually suppressive interactions throughout the ventral visual stream. While several studies have been performed on sensory competition effects among non-face stimuli relatively little is known about the interactions in the human brain for multiple face stimuli. In the present study we analyzed the neuronal basis of sensory competition in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI study using multiple face stimuli. We varied the ratio of faces and phase-noise images within a composite display with a constant number of peripheral stimuli, thereby manipulating the competitive interactions between faces. For contralaterally presented stimuli we observed strong competition effects in the fusiform face area (FFA bilaterally and in the right lateral occipital area (LOC, but not in the occipital face area (OFA, suggesting their different roles in sensory competition. When we increased the spatial distance among pairs of faces the magnitude of suppressive interactions was reduced in the FFA. Surprisingly, the magnitude of competition depended on the visual hemifield of the stimuli: ipsilateral stimulation reduced the competition effects somewhat in the right LOC while it increased them in the left LOC. This suggests a left hemifield dominance of sensory competition. Our results support the sensory competition theory in the processing of multiple faces and suggests that sensory competition occurs in several cortical areas in both cerebral hemispheres.

Activity in the fusiform face area supports expert perception in radiologists and does not depend upon holistic processing of images

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Engel, Stephen A.; Harley, Erin M.; Pope, Whitney B.; Villablanca, J. Pablo; Mazziotta, John C.; Enzmann, Dieter

2009-02-01

Training in radiology dramatically changes observers' ability to process images, but the neural bases of this visual expertise remain unexplored. Prior imaging work has suggested that the fusiform face area (FFA), normally selectively responsive to faces, becomes responsive to images in observers' area of expertise. The FFA has been hypothesized to be important for "holistic" processing that integrates information across the entire image. Here, we report a cross-sectional study of radiologists that used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural activity in first-year radiology residents, fourth-year radiology residents, and practicing radiologists as they detected abnormalities in chest radiographs. Across subjects, activity in the FFA correlated with visual expertise, measured as behavioral performance during scanning. To test whether processing in the FFA was holistic, we measured its responses both to intact radiographs and radiographs that had been divided into 25 square pieces whose locations were scrambled. Activity in the FFA was equal in magnitude for intact and scrambled images, and responses to both kinds of stimuli correlated reliably with expertise. These results suggest that the FFA is one of the cortical regions that provides the basis of expertise in radiology, but that its contribution is not holistic processing of images.

Newborns' Face Recognition Is Based on Spatial Frequencies below 0.5 Cycles per Degree

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de Heering, Adelaide; Turati, Chiara; Rossion, Bruno; Bulf, Hermann; Goffaux, Valerie; Simion, Francesca

2008-01-01

A critical question in Cognitive Science concerns how knowledge of specific domains emerges during development. Here we examined how limitations of the visual system during the first days of life may shape subsequent development of face processing abilities. By manipulating the bands of spatial frequencies of face images, we investigated what is…

Callousness and affective face processing in adults: Behavioral and brain-potential indicators.

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Brislin, Sarah J; Yancey, James R; Perkins, Emily R; Palumbo, Isabella M; Drislane, Laura E; Salekin, Randall T; Fanti, Kostas A; Kimonis, Eva R; Frick, Paul J; Blair, R James R; Patrick, Christopher J

2018-03-01

The investigation of callous-unemotional (CU) traits has been central to contemporary research on child behavior problems, and served as the impetus for inclusion of a specifier for conduct disorder in the latest edition of the official psychiatric diagnostic system. Here, we report results from 2 studies that evaluated the construct validity of callousness as assessed in adults, by testing for affiliated deficits in behavioral and neural processing of fearful faces, as have been shown in youthful samples. We hypothesized that scores on an established measure of callousness would predict reduced recognition accuracy and diminished electocortical reactivity for fearful faces in adult participants. In Study 1, 66 undergraduate participants performed an emotion recognition task in which they viewed affective faces of different types and indicated the emotion expressed by each. In Study 2, electrocortical data were collected from 254 adult twins during viewing of fearful and neutral face stimuli, and scored for event-related response components. Analyses of Study 1 data revealed that higher callousness was associated with decreased recognition accuracy for fearful faces specifically. In Study 2, callousness was associated with reduced amplitude of both N170 and P200 responses to fearful faces. Current findings demonstrate for the first time that callousness in adults is associated with both behavioral and physiological deficits in the processing of fearful faces. These findings support the validity of the CU construct with adults and highlight the possibility of a multidomain measurement framework for continued study of this important clinical construct. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Effective Connectivity from Early Visual Cortex to Posterior Occipitotemporal Face Areas Supports Face Selectivity and Predicts Developmental Prosopagnosia.

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Lohse, Michael; Garrido, Lucia; Driver, Jon; Dolan, Raymond J; Duchaine, Bradley C; Furl, Nicholas

2016-03-30

Face processing is mediated by interactions between functional areas in the occipital and temporal lobe, and the fusiform face area (FFA) and anterior temporal lobe play key roles in the recognition of facial identity. Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DP), a lifelong face recognition impairment, have been shown to have structural and functional neuronal alterations in these areas. The present study investigated how face selectivity is generated in participants with normal face processing, and how functional abnormalities associated with DP, arise as a function of network connectivity. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and dynamic causal modeling, we examined effective connectivity in normal participants by assessing network models that include early visual cortex (EVC) and face-selective areas and then investigated the integrity of this connectivity in participants with DP. Results showed that a feedforward architecture from EVC to the occipital face area, EVC to FFA, and EVC to posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) best explained how face selectivity arises in both controls and participants with DP. In this architecture, the DP group showed reduced connection strengths on feedforward connections carrying face information from EVC to FFA and EVC to pSTS. These altered network dynamics in DP contribute to the diminished face selectivity in the posterior occipitotemporal areas affected in DP. These findings suggest a novel view on the relevance of feedforward projection from EVC to posterior occipitotemporal face areas in generating cortical face selectivity and differences in face recognition ability. Areas of the human brain showing enhanced activation to faces compared to other objects or places have been extensively studied. However, the factors leading to this face selectively have remained mostly unknown. We show that effective connectivity from early visual cortex to posterior occipitotemporal face areas gives rise to face

Dogs can discriminate human smiling faces from blank expressions.

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Nagasawa, Miho; Murai, Kensuke; Mogi, Kazutaka; Kikusui, Takefumi

2011-07-01

Dogs have a unique ability to understand visual cues from humans. We investigated whether dogs can discriminate between human facial expressions. Photographs of human faces were used to test nine pet dogs in two-choice discrimination tasks. The training phases involved each dog learning to discriminate between a set of photographs of their owner's smiling and blank face. Of the nine dogs, five fulfilled these criteria and were selected for test sessions. In the test phase, 10 sets of photographs of the owner's smiling and blank face, which had previously not been seen by the dog, were presented. The dogs selected the owner's smiling face significantly more often than expected by chance. In subsequent tests, 10 sets of smiling and blank face photographs of 20 persons unfamiliar to the dogs were presented (10 males and 10 females). There was no statistical difference between the accuracy in the case of the owners and that in the case of unfamiliar persons with the same gender as the owner. However, the accuracy was significantly lower in the case of unfamiliar persons of the opposite gender to that of the owner, than with the owners themselves. These results suggest that dogs can learn to discriminate human smiling faces from blank faces by looking at photographs. Although it remains unclear whether dogs have human-like systems for visual processing of human facial expressions, the ability to learn to discriminate human facial expressions may have helped dogs adapt to human society.

Oxytocin's impact on social face processing is stronger in homosexual than heterosexual men.

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Thienel, Matthias; Heinrichs, Markus; Fischer, Stefan; Ott, Volker; Born, Jan; Hallschmid, Manfred

2014-01-01

Oxytocin is an evolutionarily highly preserved neuropeptide that contributes to the regulation of social interactions including the processing of facial stimuli. We hypothesized that its improving effect on social approach behavior depends on perceived sexual features and, consequently, on sexual orientation. In 19 homosexual and 18 heterosexual healthy young men, we investigated the acute effect of intranasal oxytocin (24IU) and placebo, respectively, on the processing of social stimuli as assessed by ratings of trustworthiness, attractiveness and approachability for male and female faces. Faces were each presented with a neutral, a happy, and an angry expression, respectively. In heterosexual subjects, the effect of oxytocin administration was restricted to a decrease in ratings of trustworthiness for angry female faces (poxytocin administration robustly increased ratings of attractiveness and approachability for male faces regardless of the facial expression (all p ≤ 0.05), as well as ratings of approachability for happy female faces (poxytocin's enhancing impact on social approach tendencies, suggesting that differences in sexual orientation imply differential oxytocinergic signaling. Copyright © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

A meta-analysis and review of holistic face processing.

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Richler, Jennifer J; Gauthier, Isabel

2014-09-01

The concept of holistic processing is a cornerstone of face recognition research, yet central questions related to holistic processing remain unanswered, and debates have thus far failed to reach a resolution despite accumulating empirical evidence. We argue that a considerable source of confusion in this literature stems from a methodological problem. Specifically, 2 measures of holistic processing based on the composite paradigm (complete design and partial design) are used in the literature, but they often lead to qualitatively different results. First, we present a comprehensive review of the work that directly compares the 2 designs, and which clearly favors the complete design over the partial design. Second, we report a meta-analysis of holistic face processing according to both designs and use this as further evidence for one design over the other. The meta-analysis effect size of holistic processing in the complete design is nearly 3 times that of the partial design. Effect sizes were not correlated between measures, consistent with the suggestion that they do not measure the same thing. Our meta-analysis also examines the correlation between conditions in the complete design of the composite task, and suggests that in an individual differences context, little is gained by including a misaligned baseline. Finally, we offer a comprehensive review of the state of knowledge about holistic processing based on evidence gathered from the measure we favor based on the 1st sections of our review-the complete design-and outline outstanding research questions in that new context. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

Situation-based social anxiety enhances the neural processing of faces: evidence from an intergroup context

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Ofan, Renana H.; Rubin, Nava

2014-01-01

Social anxiety is the intense fear of negative evaluation by others, and it emerges uniquely from a social situation. Given its social origin, we asked whether an anxiety-inducing social situation could enhance the processing of faces linked to the situational threat. While past research has focused on how individual differences in social anxiety relate to face processing, we tested the effect of manipulated social anxiety in the context of anxiety about appearing racially prejudiced in front of a peer. Visual processing of faces was indexed by the N170 component of the event-related potential. Participants viewed faces of Black and White males, along with nonfaces, either in private or while being monitored by the experimenter for signs of prejudice in a ‘public’ condition. Results revealed a difference in the N170 response to Black and Whites faces that emerged only in the public condition and only among participants high in dispositional social anxiety. These results provide new evidence that anxiety arising from the social situation modulates the earliest stages of face processing in a way that is specific to a social threat, and they shed new light on how anxiety effects on perception may contribute to the regulation of intergroup responses. PMID:23709354

Functional architecture of visual emotion recognition ability: A latent variable approach.

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Lewis, Gary J; Lefevre, Carmen E; Young, Andrew W

2016-05-01

Emotion recognition has been a focus of considerable attention for several decades. However, despite this interest, the underlying structure of individual differences in emotion recognition ability has been largely overlooked and thus is poorly understood. For example, limited knowledge exists concerning whether recognition ability for one emotion (e.g., disgust) generalizes to other emotions (e.g., anger, fear). Furthermore, it is unclear whether emotion recognition ability generalizes across modalities, such that those who are good at recognizing emotions from the face, for example, are also good at identifying emotions from nonfacial cues (such as cues conveyed via the body). The primary goal of the current set of studies was to address these questions through establishing the structure of individual differences in visual emotion recognition ability. In three independent samples (Study 1: n = 640; Study 2: n = 389; Study 3: n = 303), we observed that the ability to recognize visually presented emotions is based on different sources of variation: a supramodal emotion-general factor, supramodal emotion-specific factors, and face- and within-modality emotion-specific factors. In addition, we found evidence that general intelligence and alexithymia were associated with supramodal emotion recognition ability. Autism-like traits, empathic concern, and alexithymia were independently associated with face-specific emotion recognition ability. These results (a) provide a platform for further individual differences research on emotion recognition ability, (b) indicate that differentiating levels within the architecture of emotion recognition ability is of high importance, and (c) show that the capacity to understand expressions of emotion in others is linked to broader affective and cognitive processes. (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Face-blind for other-race faces: Individual differences in other-race recognition impairments.

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Wan, Lulu; Crookes, Kate; Dawel, Amy; Pidcock, Madeleine; Hall, Ashleigh; McKone, Elinor

2017-01-01

We report the existence of a previously undescribed group of people, namely individuals who are so poor at recognition of other-race faces that they meet criteria for clinical-level impairment (i.e., they are "face-blind" for other-race faces). Testing 550 participants, and using the well-validated Cambridge Face Memory Test for diagnosing face blindness, results show the rate of other-race face blindness to be nontrivial, specifically 8.1% of Caucasians and Asians raised in majority own-race countries. Results also show risk factors for other-race face blindness to include: a lack of interracial contact; and being at the lower end of the normal range of general face recognition ability (i.e., even for own-race faces); but not applying less individuating effort to other-race than own-race faces. Findings provide a potential resolution of contradictory evidence concerning the importance of the other-race effect (ORE), by explaining how it is possible for the mean ORE to be modest in size (suggesting a genuine but minor problem), and simultaneously for individuals to suffer major functional consequences in the real world (e.g., eyewitness misidentification of other-race offenders leading to wrongful imprisonment). Findings imply that, in legal settings, evaluating an eyewitness's chance of having made an other-race misidentification requires information about the underlying face recognition abilities of the individual witness. Additionally, analogy with prosopagnosia (inability to recognize even own-race faces) suggests everyday social interactions with other-race people, such as those between colleagues in the workplace, will be seriously impacted by the ORE in some people. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Facial identity and facial expression are initially integrated at visual perceptual stages of face processing.

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Fisher, Katie; Towler, John; Eimer, Martin

2016-01-08

It is frequently assumed that facial identity and facial expression are analysed in functionally and anatomically distinct streams within the core visual face processing system. To investigate whether expression and identity interact during the visual processing of faces, we employed a sequential matching procedure where participants compared either the identity or the expression of two successively presented faces, and ignored the other irrelevant dimension. Repetitions versus changes of facial identity and expression were varied independently across trials, and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during task performance. Irrelevant facial identity and irrelevant expression both interfered with performance in the expression and identity matching tasks. These symmetrical interference effects show that neither identity nor expression can be selectively ignored during face matching, and suggest that they are not processed independently. N250r components to identity repetitions that reflect identity matching mechanisms in face-selective visual cortex were delayed and attenuated when there was an expression change, demonstrating that facial expression interferes with visual identity matching. These findings provide new evidence for interactions between facial identity and expression within the core visual processing system, and question the hypothesis that these two attributes are processed independently. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The effects of mothers’ past infant-holding preferences on their adult children’s face processing lateralisation

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Vervloed, Mathijs P.J.; Hendriks, Angélique W.; van den Eijnde, Esther

2011-01-01

Face processing development is negatively affected when infants have not been exposed to faces for some time because of congenital cataract blocking all vision (Le Grand, Mondloch, Maurer, & Brent, 2001). It is not clear, however, whether more subtle differences in face exposure may also have an influence. The present study looked at the effect of the mother's preferred side of holding an infant, on her adult child's face processing lateralisation. Adults with a mother who had a left-arm pref...

Age effects on sensory-processing abilities and their impact on handwriting.

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Engel-Yeger, Batya; Hus, Sari; Rosenblum, Sara

2012-12-01

Sensory-processing abilities are known to deteriorate in the elderly. As a result, daily activities such as handwriting may be impaired. Yet, knowledge about sensory-processing involvement in handwriting characteristics among older persons is limited. To examine how age influences sensory-processing abilities and the impact on handwriting as a daily performance. The study participants were 118 healthy, independently functioning adults divided into four age groups: 31-45, 46-60, 61-75 and 76+ years. All participants completed the Adolescent/ Adult Sensory Profile (AASP). Handwriting process was documented using the Computerized Handwriting Penmanship Evaluation Tool (ComPET). Age significantly affects sensory processing and handwriting pressure as well as temporal and spatial measures. Both handwriting time and spatial organization of the written product were predicted by sensory seeking. When examining age contribution to the prediction of handwriting by sensory processing, sensory seeking showed a tendency for predicting handwriting pressure (p = .06), while sensory sensitivity significantly predicted handwriting velocity. Age appears to influence sensory-processing abilities and affect daily performance tasks, such as handwriting, for which sensitivity and seeking for sensations are essential. Awareness of clinicians to sensory-processing deficits among older adults and examining their impact on broader daily activities are essential to improve daily performance and quality of life.

The Caledonian face test: A new test of face discrimination.

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Logan, Andrew J; Wilkinson, Frances; Wilson, Hugh R; Gordon, Gael E; Loffler, Gunter

2016-02-01

This study aimed to develop a clinical test of face perception which is applicable to a wide range of patients and can capture normal variability. The Caledonian face test utilises synthetic faces which combine simplicity with sufficient realism to permit individual identification. Face discrimination thresholds (i.e. minimum difference between faces required for accurate discrimination) were determined in an "odd-one-out" task. The difference between faces was controlled by an adaptive QUEST procedure. A broad range of face discrimination sensitivity was determined from a group (N=52) of young adults (mean 5.75%; SD 1.18; range 3.33-8.84%). The test is fast (3-4 min), repeatable (test-re-test r(2)=0.795) and demonstrates a significant inversion effect. The potential to identify impairments of face discrimination was evaluated by testing LM who reported a lifelong difficulty with face perception. While LM's impairment for two established face tests was close to the criterion for significance (Z-scores of -2.20 and -2.27) for the Caledonian face test, her Z-score was -7.26, implying a more than threefold higher sensitivity. The new face test provides a quantifiable and repeatable assessment of face discrimination ability. The enhanced sensitivity suggests that the Caledonian face test may be capable of detecting more subtle impairments of face perception than available tests. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Shared or separate mechanisms for self-face and other-face processing? Evidence from adaptation.

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Brendan eRooney

2012-03-01

Full Text Available Evidence that self-face recognition is dissociable from general face recognition hasimportant implications both for models of social cognition and for our understanding offace recognition. In two studies, we examine how adaptation affects the perception ofpersonally familiar faces, and we use a visual adaptation paradigm to investigatewhether the neural mechanisms underlying the recognition of one’s own and other facesare shared or separate. In Study 1 we show that the representation of personally familiarfaces is rapidly updated by visual experience with unfamiliar faces, so that theperception of one’s own face and a friend’s face is altered by a brief period ofadaptation to distorted unfamiliar faces. In Study 2, participants adapted to images oftheir own and a friend’s face distorted in opposite directions; the contingent aftereffectswe observe are indicative of separate neural populations, but we suggest that thesereflect coding of facial identity rather than of the categories ‘self’ and ‘other’.

The other-race and other-species effects in face perception - a subordinate-level analysis

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Christoph David Dahl

2014-09-01

Full Text Available The ability of face discrimination is modulated by the frequency of exposure to a category of faces. In other words, lower discrimination performance was measured for infrequently encountered faces as opposed to frequently encountered ones. This phenomenon has been described in the literature: the own-race advantage, a benefit in processing own-race as opposed to the other-race faces, and the own-species advantage, a benefit in processing the conspecific type of faces as opposed to the heterospecific type. So far, the exact parameters that drive either of these two effects are not fully understood. In the following we present a full assessment of data in human participants describing the discrimination performances across two races (Asian and Caucasian as well as a range of non-human primate faces (chimpanzee, Rhesus macaque and marmoset. We measured reaction times of Asian participants performing a delayed matching-to-sample task, and correlated the results with similarity estimates of facial configuration and face parts. We found faster discrimination of own-race above other-race/species faces. Further, we found a strong reliance on configural information in upright own-species/-race faces and on individual face parts in all inverted face classes, supporting the assumption of specialized processing for the face class of most frequent exposure.

Face-to-Face Interference in Typical and Atypical Development

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Riby, Deborah M.; Doherty-Sneddon, Gwyneth; Whittle, Lisa

2012-01-01

Visual communication cues facilitate interpersonal communication. It is important that we look at faces to retrieve and subsequently process such cues. It is also important that we sometimes look away from faces as they increase cognitive load that may interfere with online processing. Indeed, when typically developing individuals hold face gaze…

Human sex differences in emotional processing of own-race and other-race faces.

Science.gov (United States)

Ran, Guangming; Chen, Xu; Pan, Yangu

2014-06-18

There is evidence that women and men show differences in the perception of affective facial expressions. However, none of the previous studies directly investigated sex differences in emotional processing of own-race and other-race faces. The current study addressed this issue using high time resolution event-related potential techniques. In total, data from 25 participants (13 women and 12 men) were analyzed. It was found that women showed increased N170 amplitudes to negative White faces compared with negative Chinese faces over the right hemisphere electrodes. This result suggests that women show enhanced sensitivity to other-race faces showing negative emotions (fear or disgust), which may contribute toward evolution. However, the current data showed that men had increased N170 amplitudes to happy Chinese versus happy White faces over the left hemisphere electrodes, indicating that men show enhanced sensitivity to own-race faces showing positive emotions (happiness). In this respect, men might use past pleasant emotional experiences to boost recognition of own-race faces.

Lateralized hybrid faces: evidence of a valence-specific bias in the processing of implicit emotions.

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Prete, Giulia; Laeng, Bruno; Tommasi, Luca

2014-01-01

It is well known that hemispheric asymmetries exist for both the analyses of low-level visual information (such as spatial frequency) and high-level visual information (such as emotional expressions). In this study, we assessed which of the above factors underlies perceptual laterality effects with "hybrid faces": a type of stimulus that allows testing for unaware processing of emotional expressions, when the emotion is displayed in the low-frequency information while an image of the same face with a neutral expression is superimposed to it. Despite hybrid faces being perceived as neutral, the emotional information modulates observers' social judgements. In the present study, participants were asked to assess friendliness of hybrid faces displayed tachistoscopically, either centrally or laterally to fixation. We found a clear influence of the hidden emotions also with lateral presentations. Happy faces were rated as more friendly and angry faces as less friendly with respect to neutral faces. In general, hybrid faces were evaluated as less friendly when they were presented in the left visual field/right hemisphere than in the right visual field/left hemisphere. The results extend the validity of the valence hypothesis in the specific domain of unaware (subcortical) emotion processing.

Does dynamic information about the speaker's face contribute to semantic speech processing? ERP evidence.

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Hernández-Gutiérrez, David; Abdel Rahman, Rasha; Martín-Loeches, Manuel; Muñoz, Francisco; Schacht, Annekathrin; Sommer, Werner

2018-07-01

Face-to-face interactions characterize communication in social contexts. These situations are typically multimodal, requiring the integration of linguistic auditory input with facial information from the speaker. In particular, eye gaze and visual speech provide the listener with social and linguistic information, respectively. Despite the importance of this context for an ecological study of language, research on audiovisual integration has mainly focused on the phonological level, leaving aside effects on semantic comprehension. Here we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the influence of facial dynamic information on semantic processing of connected speech. Participants were presented with either a video or a still picture of the speaker, concomitant to auditory sentences. Along three experiments, we manipulated the presence or absence of the speaker's dynamic facial features (mouth and eyes) and compared the amplitudes of the semantic N400 elicited by unexpected words. Contrary to our predictions, the N400 was not modulated by dynamic facial information; therefore, semantic processing seems to be unaffected by the speaker's gaze and visual speech. Even though, during the processing of expected words, dynamic faces elicited a long-lasting late posterior positivity compared to the static condition. This effect was significantly reduced when the mouth of the speaker was covered. Our findings may indicate an increase of attentional processing to richer communicative contexts. The present findings also demonstrate that in natural communicative face-to-face encounters, perceiving the face of a speaker in motion provides supplementary information that is taken into account by the listener, especially when auditory comprehension is non-demanding. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Processing of Words and Faces by Patients with Left and Right Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

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Andrew W. Ellis

1991-01-01

Full Text Available Tests of word and face processing were given to patients with complex partial epilepsy focussed on the left or right temporal lobe, and to non-epileptic control subjects. The left TLE group showed the greatest impairment on object naming and on reading tests, but the right TLE group also showed a lesser impairment relative to the normal control subjects on both tests. The right TLE group was selectively impaired on distinguishing famous from non-famous faces while the left TLE group was impaired at naming famous faces they had successfully recognized as familiar. There was no significant difference between the three groups on recognition memory for words. The implications of the results for theories of the role of the temporal lobes in word and face processing, and the possible neural mechanisms responsible for the deficits in TLE patients, are discussed.

Beyond Faces and Expertise: Facelike Holistic Processing of Nonface Objects in the Absence of Expertise.

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Zhao, Mintao; Bülthoff, Heinrich H; Bülthoff, Isabelle

2016-02-01

Holistic processing-the tendency to perceive objects as indecomposable wholes-has long been viewed as a process specific to faces or objects of expertise. Although current theories differ in what causes holistic processing, they share a fundamental constraint for its generalization: Nonface objects cannot elicit facelike holistic processing in the absence of expertise. Contrary to this prevailing view, here we show that line patterns with salient Gestalt information (i.e., connectedness, closure, and continuity between parts) can be processed as holistically as faces without any training. Moreover, weakening the saliency of Gestalt information in these patterns reduced holistic processing of them, which indicates that Gestalt information plays a crucial role in holistic processing. Therefore, holistic processing can be achieved not only via a top-down route based on expertise, but also via a bottom-up route relying merely on object-based information. The finding that facelike holistic processing can extend beyond the domains of faces and objects of expertise poses a challenge to current dominant theories. © The Author(s) 2015.

From Facial Emotional Recognition Abilities to Emotional Attribution: A Study in Down Syndrome

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Hippolyte, Loyse; Barisnikov, Koviljka; Van der Linden, Martial; Detraux, Jean-Jacques

2009-01-01

Facial expression processing and the attribution of facial emotions to a context were investigated in adults with Down syndrome (DS) in two experiments. Their performances were compared with those of a child control group matched for receptive vocabulary. The ability to process faces without emotional content was controlled for, and no differences…

Processing of unconventional stimuli requires the recruitment of the non-specialized hemisphere

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Yoed Nissan Kenett

2015-02-01

Full Text Available In the present study we investigate hemispheric processing of conventional and unconventional visual stimuli in the context of visual and verbal creative ability. In Experiment 1, we studied two unconventional visual recognition tasks – Mooney face and objects' silhouette recognition – and found a significant relationship between measures of verbal creativity and unconventional face recognition. In Experiment 2 we used the split visual field paradigm to investigate hemispheric processing of conventional and unconventional faces and its relation to verbal and visual characteristics of creativity. Results showed that while conventional faces were better processed by the specialized right hemisphere, unconventional faces were better processed by the non-specialized left hemisphere. In addition, only unconventional face processing by the non-specialized left hemisphere was related to verbal and visual measures of creative ability. Our findings demonstrate the role of the non-specialized hemisphere in processing unconventional stimuli and how it relates to creativity.

Don't look at me in anger! Enhanced processing of angry faces in anticipation of public speaking.

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Wieser, Matthias J; Pauli, Paul; Reicherts, Philipp; Mühlberger, Andreas

2010-03-01

Anxiety is supposed to enhance the processing of threatening information. Here, we investigated the cortical processing of angry faces during anticipated public speaking. To elicit anxiety, a group of participants was told that they would have to perform a public speech. As a control condition, another group was told that they would have to write a short essay. During anticipation of these tasks, participants saw facial expressions (angry, happy, and neutral) while electroencephalogram was recorded. Event-related potential analysis revealed larger N170 amplitudes for angry compared to happy and neutral faces in the anxiety group. The early posterior negativity as an index of motivated attention was also enhanced for angry compared to happy and neutral faces in participants anticipating public speaking. These results indicate that fear of public speaking influences early perceptual processing of faces such that especially the processing of angry faces is facilitated.

A post-processing study on aluminum surface by fiber laser: Removing face milling patterns

Science.gov (United States)

Kayahan, Ersin

2018-05-01

The face milling process of the metal surface is a well-known machining process of using rotary cutters to remove material from a workpiece. Flat metal surfaces can be produced by a face milling process. However, in practice, visible, traced marks following the motion of points on the cutter's face are usually apparent. In this study, it was shown that milled patterns can be removed by means of 20 W fiber laser on the aluminum surface (AA7075). Experimental results also showed that roughened and hydrophobic surface can be produced with optimized laser parameters. It is a new approach to remove the patterns from the metal surface and can be explained through roughening by re-melting instead of ablation. The new method is a strong candidate to replace sandblasting the metal surface. It is also cheap and environmentally friendly.

Individual differences in detecting rapidly presented fearful faces.

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Dandan Zhang

Full Text Available Rapid detection of evolutionarily relevant threats (e.g., fearful faces is important for human survival. The ability to rapidly detect fearful faces exhibits high variability across individuals. The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between behavioral detection ability and brain activity, using both event-related potential (ERP and event-related oscillation (ERO measurements. Faces with fearful or neutral facial expressions were presented for 17 ms or 200 ms in a backward masking paradigm. Forty-two participants were required to discriminate facial expressions of the masked faces. The behavioral sensitivity index d' showed that the detection ability to rapidly presented and masked fearful faces varied across participants. The ANOVA analyses showed that the facial expression, hemisphere, and presentation duration affected the grand-mean ERP (N1, P1, and N170 and ERO (below 20 Hz and lasted from 100 ms to 250 ms post-stimulus, mainly in theta band brain activity. More importantly, the overall detection ability of 42 subjects was significantly correlated with the emotion effect (i.e., fearful vs. neutral on ERP (r = 0.403 and ERO (r = 0.552 measurements. A higher d' value was corresponding to a larger size of the emotional effect (i.e., fearful--neutral of N170 amplitude and a larger size of the emotional effect of the specific ERO spectral power at the right hemisphere. The present results suggested a close link between behavioral detection ability and the N170 amplitude as well as the ERO spectral power below 20 Hz in individuals. The emotional effect size between fearful and neutral faces in brain activity may reflect the level of conscious awareness of fearful faces.

Endocrinology Telehealth Consultation Improved Glycemic Control Similar to Face-to-Face Visits in Veterans.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Winnie; Saxon, David R; McNair, Bryan; Sanagorski, Rebecca; Rasouli, Neda

2016-09-01

Rates of diabetes for veterans who receive health care through the Veterans Health Administration are higher than rates in the general population. Furthermore, many veterans live in rural locations, far from Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals, thus limiting their ability to readily seek face-to-face endocrinology care for diabetes. Telehealth (TH) technologies present an opportunity to improve access to specialty diabetes care for such patients; however, there is a lack of evidence regarding the ability of TH to improve glycemic control in comparison to traditional face-to-face consultations. This was a retrospective cohort study of all new endocrinology diabetes consultations at the Denver VA Medical Center over a 1-year period. A total of 189 patients were included in the analysis. In all, 85 patients had received face-to-face (FTF) endocrinology consultation for diabetes and 104 patients had received TH consultation. Subjects were mostly males (94.7%) and the mean age was 62.8 ± 10.1 years old. HbA1c improved from 9.76% (9.40% to 10.11%) to 8.55% (8.20% to 8.91%) (P Endocrinology TH consultations improved short-term glycemic control as effectively as traditional FTF visits in a veteran population with diabetes. © 2016 Diabetes Technology Society.

Improvement of the Shock Absorption Ability of a Face Guard by Incorporating a Glass-Fiber-Reinforced Thermoplastic and Buffering Space

OpenAIRE

Wada, Takahiro; Churei, Hiroshi; Takayanagi, Haruka; Iwasaki, Naohiko; Ueno, Toshiaki; Takahashi, Hidekazu; Uo, Motohiro

2018-01-01

This study aimed to evaluate the shock absorption ability of trial face guards (FGs) incorporating a glass-fiber-reinforced thermoplastic (GF) and buffering space. The mechanical properties of 3.2 mm and 1.6 mm thick commercial medical splint materials (Aquaplast, AP) and experimental GF prepared from 1.6 mm thick AP and fiberglass cloth were determined by a three-point bending test. Shock absorption tests were conducted on APs with two different thicknesses and two types of experimental mate...

Decoding of faces and face components in face-sensitive human visual cortex

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David F Nichols

2010-07-01

Full Text Available A great challenge to the field of visual neuroscience is to understand how faces are encoded and represented within the human brain. Here we show evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI for spatially distributed processing of the whole face and its components in face-sensitive human visual cortex. We used multi-class linear pattern classifiers constructed with a leave-one-scan-out verification procedure to discriminate brain activation patterns elicited by whole faces, the internal features alone, and the external head outline alone. Furthermore, our results suggest that whole faces are represented disproportionately in the fusiform cortex (FFA whereas the building blocks of faces are represented disproportionately in occipitotemporal cortex (OFA. Faces and face components may therefore be organized with functional clustering within both the FFA and OFA, but with specialization for face components in the OFA and the whole face in the FFA.

How Well Do Computer-Generated Faces Tap Face Expertise?

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Kate Crookes

Full Text Available The use of computer-generated (CG stimuli in face processing research is proliferating due to the ease with which faces can be generated, standardised and manipulated. However there has been surprisingly little research into whether CG faces are processed in the same way as photographs of real faces. The present study assessed how well CG faces tap face identity expertise by investigating whether two indicators of face expertise are reduced for CG faces when compared to face photographs. These indicators were accuracy for identification of own-race faces and the other-race effect (ORE-the well-established finding that own-race faces are recognised more accurately than other-race faces. In Experiment 1 Caucasian and Asian participants completed a recognition memory task for own- and other-race real and CG faces. Overall accuracy for own-race faces was dramatically reduced for CG compared to real faces and the ORE was significantly and substantially attenuated for CG faces. Experiment 2 investigated perceptual discrimination for own- and other-race real and CG faces with Caucasian and Asian participants. Here again, accuracy for own-race faces was significantly reduced for CG compared to real faces. However the ORE was not affected by format. Together these results signal that CG faces of the type tested here do not fully tap face expertise. Technological advancement may, in the future, produce CG faces that are equivalent to real photographs. Until then caution is advised when interpreting results obtained using CG faces.

The Effects of Mothers' Past Infant-Holding Preferences on Their Adult Children's Face Processing Lateralisation

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Vervloed, Mathijs P. J.; Hendriks, Angelique W.; van den Eijnde, Esther

2011-01-01

Face processing development is negatively affected when infants have not been exposed to faces for some time because of congenital cataract blocking all vision (Le Grand, Mondloch, Maurer, & Brent, 2001). It is not clear, however, whether more subtle differences in face exposure may also have an influence. The present study looked at the effect of…

Big Questions Facing Vocational Psychology: A Cognitive Information Processing Perspective

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Reardon, Robert C.; Lenz, Janet G.; Sampson, James P., Jr.; Peterson, Gary W.

2011-01-01

This article draws upon the authors' experience in developing cognitive information processing theory in order to examine three important questions facing vocational psychology and assessment: (a) Where should new knowledge for vocational psychology come from? (b) How do career theories and research find their way into practice? and (c) What is…

Plasma spraying process of disperse carbides for spraying and facing

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Blinkov, I.V.; Vishnevetskaya, I.A.; Kostyukovich, T.G.; Ostapovich, A.O.

1989-01-01

A possibility to metallize carbides in plasma of impulsing capacitor discharge is considered. Powders granulation occurs during plasma spraying process, ceramic core being completely capped. X-ray phase and chemical analyses of coatings did not show considerable changes of carbon content in carbides before and after plasma processing. This distinguishes the process of carbides metallization in impulsing plasma from the similar processing in arc and high-frequency plasma generator. Use of powder composites produced in the impulsing capacitor discharge, for plasma spraying and laser facing permits 2-3 times increasing wear resistance of the surface layer as against the coatings produced from mechanical powders mixtures

Voicing on Virtual and Face to Face Discussion

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Yamat, Hamidah

2013-01-01

This paper presents and discusses findings of a study conducted on pre-service teachers' experiences in virtual and face to face discussions. Technology has brought learning nowadays beyond the classroom context or time zone. The learning context and process no longer rely solely on face to face communications in the presence of a teacher.…

Abnormal GABAergic function and face processing in schizophrenia: A pharmacologic-fMRI study.

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Tso, Ivy F; Fang, Yu; Phan, K Luan; Welsh, Robert C; Taylor, Stephan F

2015-10-01

The involvement of the gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) system in schizophrenia is suggested by postmortem studies and the common use of GABA receptor-potentiating agents in treatment. In a recent study, we used a benzodiazepine challenge to demonstrate abnormal GABAergic function during processing of negative visual stimuli in schizophrenia. This study extended this investigation by mapping GABAergic mechanisms associated with face processing and social appraisal in schizophrenia using a benzodiazepine challenge. Fourteen stable, medicated schizophrenia/schizoaffective patients (SZ) and 13 healthy controls (HC) underwent functional MRI using the blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) technique while they performed the Socio-emotional Preference Task (SePT) on emotional face stimuli ("Do you like this face?"). Participants received single-blinded intravenous saline and lorazepam (LRZ) in two separate sessions separated by 1-3weeks. Both SZ and HC recruited medial prefrontal cortex/anterior cingulate during the SePT, relative to gender identification. A significant drug by group interaction was observed in the medial occipital cortex, such that SZ showed increased BOLD signal to LRZ challenge, while HC showed an expected decrease of signal; the interaction did not vary by task. The altered BOLD response to LRZ challenge in SZ was significantly correlated with increased negative affect across multiple measures. The altered response to LRZ challenge suggests that abnormal face processing and negative affect in SZ are associated with altered GABAergic function in the visual cortex, underscoring the role of impaired visual processing in socio-emotional deficits in schizophrenia. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Meta-analytic review of the development of face discrimination in infancy: Face race, face gender, infant age, and methodology moderate face discrimination.

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Sugden, Nicole A; Marquis, Alexandra R

2017-11-01

Infants show facility for discriminating between individual faces within hours of birth. Over the first year of life, infants' face discrimination shows continued improvement with familiar face types, such as own-race faces, but not with unfamiliar face types, like other-race faces. The goal of this meta-analytic review is to provide an effect size for infants' face discrimination ability overall, with own-race faces, and with other-race faces within the first year of life, how this differs with age, and how it is influenced by task methodology. Inclusion criteria were (a) infant participants aged 0 to 12 months, (b) completing a human own- or other-race face discrimination task, (c) with discrimination being determined by infant looking. Our analysis included 30 works (165 samples, 1,926 participants participated in 2,623 tasks). The effect size for infants' face discrimination was small, 6.53% greater than chance (i.e., equal looking to the novel and familiar). There was a significant difference in discrimination by race, overall (own-race, 8.18%; other-race, 3.18%) and between ages (own-race: 0- to 4.5-month-olds, 7.32%; 5- to 7.5-month-olds, 9.17%; and 8- to 12-month-olds, 7.68%; other-race: 0- to 4.5-month-olds, 6.12%; 5- to 7.5-month-olds, 3.70%; and 8- to 12-month-olds, 2.79%). Multilevel linear (mixed-effects) models were used to predict face discrimination; infants' capacity to discriminate faces is sensitive to face characteristics including race, gender, and emotion as well as the methods used, including task timing, coding method, and visual angle. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

A Face Inversion Effect without a Face

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Brandman, Talia; Yovel, Galit

2012-01-01

Numerous studies have attributed the face inversion effect (FIE) to configural processing of internal facial features in upright but not inverted faces. Recent findings suggest that face mechanisms can be activated by faceless stimuli presented in the context of a body. Here we asked whether faceless stimuli with or without body context may induce…

Emotional face recognition in adolescent suicide attempters and adolescents engaging in non-suicidal self-injury.

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Seymour, Karen E; Jones, Richard N; Cushman, Grace K; Galvan, Thania; Puzia, Megan E; Kim, Kerri L; Spirito, Anthony; Dickstein, Daniel P

2016-03-01

Little is known about the bio-behavioral mechanisms underlying and differentiating suicide attempts from non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) in adolescents. Adolescents who attempt suicide or engage in NSSI often report significant interpersonal and social difficulties. Emotional face recognition ability is a fundamental skill required for successful social interactions, and deficits in this ability may provide insight into the unique brain-behavior interactions underlying suicide attempts versus NSSI in adolescents. Therefore, we examined emotional face recognition ability among three mutually exclusive groups: (1) inpatient adolescents who attempted suicide (SA, n = 30); (2) inpatient adolescents engaged in NSSI (NSSI, n = 30); and (3) typically developing controls (TDC, n = 30) without psychiatric illness. Participants included adolescents aged 13-17 years, matched on age, gender and full-scale IQ. Emotional face recognition was evaluated using the diagnostic assessment of nonverbal accuracy (DANVA-2). Compared to TDC youth, adolescents with NSSI made more errors on child fearful and adult sad face recognition while controlling for psychopathology and medication status (ps face recognition between NSSI and SA groups. Secondary analyses showed that compared to inpatients without major depression, those with major depression made fewer errors on adult sad face recognition even when controlling for group status (p recognition errors on adult happy faces even when controlling for group status (p face recognition than TDC, but not inpatient adolescents who attempted suicide. Further results suggest the importance of psychopathology in emotional face recognition. Replication of these preliminary results and examination of the role of context-dependent emotional processing are needed moving forward.

The effect of affective context on visuocortical processing of neutral faces in social anxiety - An ERP study

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Matthias J Wieser

2015-11-01

Full Text Available It has been demonstrated that verbal context information alters the neural processing of ambiguous faces such as faces with no apparent facial expression. In social anxiety, neutral faces may be implicitly threatening for socially anxious individuals due to their ambiguous nature, but even more so if these neutral faces are put in self-referential negative contexts. Therefore, we measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs in response to neutral faces which were preceded by affective verbal information (negative, neutral, positive. Participants with low social anxiety (LSA; n = 23 and high social anxiety (HSA; n = 21 were asked to watch and rate valence and arousal of the respective faces while continuous EEG was recorded. ERP analysis revealed that HSA showed elevated P100 amplitudes in response to faces, but reduced structural encoding of faces as indexed by reduced N170 amplitudes. In general, affective context led to an enhanced early posterior negativity (EPN for negative compared to neutral facial expressions. Moreover, HSA compared to LSA showed enhanced late positive potentials (LPP to negatively contextualized faces, whereas in LSA this effect was found for faces in positive contexts. Also, HSA rated faces in negative contexts as more negative compared to LSA. These results point at enhanced vigilance for neutral faces regardless of context in HSA, while structural encoding seems to be diminished (avoidance. Interestingly, later components of sustained processing (LPP indicate that LSA show enhanced visuocortical processing for faces in positive contexts (happy bias, whereas this seems to be the case for negatively contextualized faces in HSA (threat bias. Finally, our results add further new evidence that top-down information in interaction with individual anxiety levels can influence early-stage aspects of visual perception.

Age-related differences in event-related potentials for early visual processing of emotional faces.

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Hilimire, Matthew R; Mienaltowski, Andrew; Blanchard-Fields, Fredda; Corballis, Paul M

2014-07-01

With advancing age, processing resources are shifted away from negative emotional stimuli and toward positive ones. Here, we explored this 'positivity effect' using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants identified the presence or absence of a visual probe that appeared over photographs of emotional faces. The ERPs elicited by the onsets of angry, sad, happy and neutral faces were recorded. We examined the frontocentral emotional positivity (FcEP), which is defined as a positive deflection in the waveforms elicited by emotional expressions relative to neutral faces early on in the time course of the ERP. The FcEP is thought to reflect enhanced early processing of emotional expressions. The results show that within the first 130 ms young adults show an FcEP to negative emotional expressions, whereas older adults show an FcEP to positive emotional expressions. These findings provide additional evidence that the age-related positivity effect in emotion processing can be traced to automatic processes that are evident very early in the processing of emotional facial expressions. © The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

The effects of mothers’ past infant-holding preferences on their adult children’s face processing lateralization

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Vervloed, M.P.J.; Hendriks, A.W.C.J.; Eijnde, E. van den

2011-01-01

Face processing development is negatively affected when infants have not been exposed to faces for some time because of congenital cataract blocking all vision (Le Grand, Mondloch, Maurer, & Brent, 2001). It is not clear, however, whether more subtle differences in face exposure may also have an

Specific vulnerability of face perception to noise: a similar effect in schizophrenia patients and healthy individuals.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Yue; McBain, Ryan; Norton, Daniel

2015-02-28

Face perception plays a foundational role in the social world. This perceptual ability is deficient in schizophrenia. A noise-filtering mechanism is essential for perceptual processing. It remains unclear as to whether a specific noise-filtering mechanism is implicated in the face perception problem or a general noise-filtering mechanism is involved which also mediates non-face visual perception problems associated with this psychiatric disorder. This study examined and compared the effects of external noise on the performance of face discrimination and car discrimination in schizophrenia patients (n=25) and healthy controls (n=27). Superimposing the external visual noise on face or car stimuli elevated perceptual thresholds (i.e. degraded performance levels) for both face and car discrimination. However, the effect of noise was significantly larger on face than on car discrimination, both in patients and controls. This pattern of results suggests specific vulnerability of face processing to noise in healthy individuals and those with schizophrenia. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Putting the face in context: Body expressions impact facial emotion processing in human infants

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Purva Rajhans

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Body expressions exert strong contextual effects on facial emotion perception in adults. Specifically, conflicting body cues hamper the recognition of emotion from faces, as evident on both the behavioral and neural level. We examined the developmental origins of the neural processes involved in emotion perception across body and face in 8-month-old infants by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs. We primed infants with body postures (fearful, happy that were followed by either congruent or incongruent facial expressions. Our results revealed that body expressions impact facial emotion processing and that incongruent body cues impair the neural discrimination of emotional facial expressions. Priming effects were associated with attentional and recognition memory processes, as reflected in a modulation of the Nc and Pc evoked at anterior electrodes. These findings demonstrate that 8-month-old infants possess neural mechanisms that allow for the integration of emotion across body and face, providing evidence for the early developmental emergence of context-sensitive facial emotion perception.

Application of complex inoculants in improving the process-ability of grey cast iron for cylinder blocks

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LIU Wei-ming

2006-05-01

Full Text Available Effect of several complex inoculants on mechanical properties, process-ability and sensibility of grey cast iron used in cylinder block were investigated. The experimental results showed that the grey cast iron treated with 60%FeSi75+40%RE complex inoculants has tensile strength consistently at about 295 MPa along with good hardness and improved metallurgy quality. While the grey cast iron inoculated with 20%FeSi75+80%Sr compound inoculants has the best process-ability, the lowest cross-section sensibility and the least microhardness difference. The wear amount of the drill increases correspondingly with the increase of the microhardness difference of matrix structure, indicating the great effect of homogeneousness of matrix structure in the grey cast iron on the machinability of the grey cast iron.

Using Face Recognition System in Ship Protection Process

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Miroslav Bača

2006-03-01

Full Text Available The process of security improvement is a huge problem especiallyin large ships. Terrorist attacks and everyday threatsagainst life and property destroy transport and tourist companies,especially large tourist ships. Every person on a ship can berecognized and identified using something that the personknows or by means of something the person possesses. The bestresults will be obtained by using a combination of the person'sknowledge with one biometric characteristic. Analyzing theproblem of biometrics in ITS security we can conclude that facerecognition process supported by one or two traditional biometriccharacteristics can give very good results regarding ship security.In this paper we will describe a biometric system basedon face recognition. Special focus will be given to crew member'sbiometric security in crisis situation like kidnapping, robbelyor illness.

Configuration perception and face memory, and face context effects in developmental prosopagnosia.

Science.gov (United States)

Huis in 't Veld, Elisabeth; Van den Stock, Jan; de Gelder, Beatrice

2012-01-01

This study addresses two central and controversial issues in developmental prosopagnosia (DP), configuration- versus feature-based face processing and the influence of affective information from either facial or bodily expressions on face recognition. A sample of 10 DPs and 10 controls were tested with a previously developed face and object recognition and memory battery (Facial Expressive Action Stimulus Test, FEAST), a task measuring the influence of emotional faces and bodies on face identity matching (Face-Body Compound task), and an emotionally expressive face memory task (Emotional Face Memory task, FaMe-E). We show that DPs were impaired in upright, but not inverted, face matching but they performed at the level of controls on part-to-whole matching. Second, DPs showed impaired memory for both neutral and emotional faces and scored within the normal range on the Face-Body Compound task. Third, configural perception but not feature-based processing was significantly associated with memory performance. Taken together the results indicate that DPs have a deficit in configural processing at the perception stage that may underlie the memory impairment.

The other-race effect in face learning: Using naturalistic images to investigate face ethnicity effects in a learning paradigm.

Science.gov (United States)

Hayward, William G; Favelle, Simone K; Oxner, Matt; Chu, Ming Hon; Lam, Sze Man

2017-05-01

The other-race effect in face identification has been reported in many situations and by many different ethnicities, yet it remains poorly understood. One reason for this lack of clarity may be a limitation in the methodologies that have been used to test it. Experiments typically use an old-new recognition task to demonstrate the existence of the other-race effect, but such tasks are susceptible to different social and perceptual influences, particularly in terms of the extent to which all faces are equally individuated at study. In this paper we report an experiment in which we used a face learning methodology to measure the other-race effect. We obtained naturalistic photographs of Chinese and Caucasian individuals, which allowed us to test the ability of participants to generalize their learning to new ecologically valid exemplars of a face identity. We show a strong own-race advantage in face learning, such that participants required many fewer trials to learn names of own-race individuals than those of other-race individuals and were better able to identify learned own-race individuals in novel naturalistic stimuli. Since our methodology requires individuation of all faces, and generalization over large image changes, our finding of an other-race effect can be attributed to a specific deficit in the sensitivity of perceptual and memory processes to other-race faces.

Delayed processing of global shape information in developmental prosopagnosia

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Gerlach, Christian; Klargaard, Solja K.; Petersen, Anders

2017-01-01

There is accumulating evidence suggesting that a central deficit in developmental prosopagnosia (DP), a disorder characterized by profound and lifelong difficulties with face recognition, concerns impaired holistic processing. Some of this evidence comes from studies using Navon’s paradigm where...... that this reduced global precedence effect correlates both with the DPs’ face recognition abilities, as well as their ability to recognize degraded (non-face) objects. We suggest that the DPs’ impaired performance in all three domains (Navon, face and object recognition) may be related to the same dysfunction...

Inferring social attributes from different face regions: evidence for holistic processing.

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Santos, Isabel M; Young, Andrew W

2011-04-01

Two experiments investigated the role that different face regions play in a variety of social judgements that are commonly made from facial appearance (sex, age, distinctiveness, attractiveness, approachability, trustworthiness, and intelligence). These judgements lie along a continuum from those with a clear physical basis and high consequent accuracy (sex, age) to judgements that can achieve a degree of consensus between observers despite having little known validity (intelligence, trustworthiness). Results from Experiment 1 indicated that the face's internal features (eyes, nose, and mouth) provide information that is more useful for social inferences than the external features (hair, face shape, ears, and chin), especially when judging traits such as approachability and trustworthiness. Experiment 2 investigated how judgement agreement was affected when the upper head, eye, nose, or mouth regions were presented in isolation or when these regions were obscured. A different pattern of results emerged for different characteristics, indicating that different types of facial information are used in the various judgements. Moreover, the informativeness of a particular region/feature depends on whether it is presented alone or in the context of the whole face. These findings provide evidence for the importance of holistic processing in making social attributions from facial appearance.

Task-irrelevant emotion facilitates face discrimination learning.

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Lorenzino, Martina; Caudek, Corrado

2015-03-01

We understand poorly how the ability to discriminate faces from one another is shaped by visual experience. The purpose of the present study is to determine whether face discrimination learning can be facilitated by facial emotions. To answer this question, we used a task-irrelevant perceptual learning paradigm because it closely mimics the learning processes that, in daily life, occur without a conscious intention to learn and without an attentional focus on specific facial features. We measured face discrimination thresholds before and after training. During the training phase (4 days), participants performed a contrast discrimination task on face images. They were not informed that we introduced (task-irrelevant) subtle variations in the face images from trial to trial. For the Identity group, the task-irrelevant features were variations along a morphing continuum of facial identity. For the Emotion group, the task-irrelevant features were variations along an emotional expression morphing continuum. The Control group did not undergo contrast discrimination learning and only performed the pre-training and post-training tests, with the same temporal gap between them as the other two groups. Results indicate that face discrimination improved, but only for the Emotion group. Participants in the Emotion group, moreover, showed face discrimination improvements also for stimulus variations along the facial identity dimension, even if these (task-irrelevant) stimulus features had not been presented during training. The present results highlight the importance of emotions for face discrimination learning. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Different underlying mechanisms for face emotion and gender processing during feature-selective attention: Evidence from event-related potential studies.

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Wang, Hailing; Ip, Chengteng; Fu, Shimin; Sun, Pei

2017-05-01

Face recognition theories suggest that our brains process invariant (e.g., gender) and changeable (e.g., emotion) facial dimensions separately. To investigate whether these two dimensions are processed in different time courses, we analyzed the selection negativity (SN, an event-related potential component reflecting attentional modulation) elicited by face gender and emotion during a feature selective attention task. Participants were instructed to attend to a combination of face emotion and gender attributes in Experiment 1 (bi-dimensional task) and to either face emotion or gender in Experiment 2 (uni-dimensional task). The results revealed that face emotion did not elicit a substantial SN, whereas face gender consistently generated a substantial SN in both experiments. These results suggest that face gender is more sensitive to feature-selective attention and that face emotion is encoded relatively automatically on SN, implying the existence of different underlying processing mechanisms for invariant and changeable facial dimensions. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

How a hat may affect 3-month-olds' recognition of a face: an eye-tracking study.

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Bulf, Hermann; Valenza, Eloisa; Turati, Chiara

2013-01-01

Recent studies have shown that infants' face recognition rests on a robust face representation that is resilient to a variety of facial transformations such as rotations in depth, motion, occlusion or deprivation of inner/outer features. Here, we investigated whether 3-month-old infants' ability to represent the invariant aspects of a face is affected by the presence of an external add-on element, i.e. a hat. Using a visual habituation task, three experiments were carried out in which face recognition was investigated by manipulating the presence/absence of a hat during face encoding (i.e. habituation phase) and face recognition (i.e. test phase). An eye-tracker system was used to record the time infants spent looking at face-relevant information compared to the hat. The results showed that infants' face recognition was not affected by the presence of the external element when the type of the hat did not vary between the habituation and test phases, and when both the novel and the familiar face wore the same hat during the test phase (Experiment 1). Infants' ability to recognize the invariant aspects of a face was preserved also when the hat was absent in the habituation phase and the same hat was shown only during the test phase (Experiment 2). Conversely, when the novel face identity competed with a novel hat, the hat triggered the infants' attention, interfering with the recognition process and preventing the infants' preference for the novel face during the test phase (Experiment 3). Findings from the current study shed light on how faces and objects are processed when they are simultaneously presented in the same visual scene, contributing to an understanding of how infants respond to the multiple and composite information available in their surrounding environment.

Face time: educating face transplant candidates.

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Lamparello, Brooke M; Bueno, Ericka M; Diaz-Siso, Jesus Rodrigo; Sisk, Geoffroy C; Pomahac, Bohdan

2013-01-01

Face transplantation is the innovative application of microsurgery and immunology to restore appearance and function to those with severe facial disfigurements. Our group aims to establish a multidisciplinary education program that can facilitate informed consent and build a strong knowledge base in patients to enhance adherence to medication regimes, recovery, and quality of life. We analyzed handbooks from our institution's solid organ transplant programs to identify topics applicable to face transplant patients. The team identified unique features of face transplantation that warrant comprehensive patient education. We created a 181-page handbook to provide subjects interested in pursuing transplantation with a written source of information on the process and team members and to address concerns they may have. While the handbook covers a wide range of topics, it is easy to understand and visually appealing. Face transplantation has many unique aspects that must be relayed to the patients pursuing this novel therapy. Since candidates lack third-party support groups and programs, the transplant team must provide an extensive educational component to enhance this complex process. As face transplantation continues to develop, programs must create sound education programs that address patients' needs and concerns to facilitate optimal care.

Face processing regions are sensitive to distinct aspects of temporal sequence in facial dynamics.

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Reinl, Maren; Bartels, Andreas

2014-11-15

Facial movement conveys important information for social interactions, yet its neural processing is poorly understood. Computational models propose that shape- and temporal sequence sensitive mechanisms interact in processing dynamic faces. While face processing regions are known to respond to facial movement, their sensitivity to particular temporal sequences has barely been studied. Here we used fMRI to examine the sensitivity of human face-processing regions to two aspects of directionality in facial movement trajectories. We presented genuine movie recordings of increasing and decreasing fear expressions, each of which were played in natural or reversed frame order. This two-by-two factorial design matched low-level visual properties, static content and motion energy within each factor, emotion-direction (increasing or decreasing emotion) and timeline (natural versus artificial). The results showed sensitivity for emotion-direction in FFA, which was timeline-dependent as it only occurred within the natural frame order, and sensitivity to timeline in the STS, which was emotion-direction-dependent as it only occurred for decreased fear. The occipital face area (OFA) was sensitive to the factor timeline. These findings reveal interacting temporal sequence sensitive mechanisms that are responsive to both ecological meaning and to prototypical unfolding of facial dynamics. These mechanisms are temporally directional, provide socially relevant information regarding emotional state or naturalness of behavior, and agree with predictions from modeling and predictive coding theory. Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Face Processing in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Independent or Interactive Processing of Facial Identity and Facial Expression?

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Krebs, Julia F.; Biswas, Ajanta; Pascalis, Olivier; Kamp-Becker, Inge; Remschmidt, Helmuth; Schwarzer, Gudrun

2011-01-01

The current study investigated if deficits in processing emotional expression affect facial identity processing and vice versa in children with autism spectrum disorder. Children with autism and IQ and age matched typically developing children classified faces either by emotional expression, thereby ignoring facial identity or by facial identity…

[Face recognition in patients with autism spectrum disorders].

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Kita, Yosuke; Inagaki, Masumi

2012-07-01

The present study aimed to review previous research conducted on face recognition in patients with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Face recognition is a key question in the ASD research field because it can provide clues for elucidating the neural substrates responsible for the social impairment of these patients. Historically, behavioral studies have reported low performance and/or unique strategies of face recognition among ASD patients. However, the performance and strategy of ASD patients is comparable to those of the control group, depending on the experimental situation or developmental stage, suggesting that face recognition of ASD patients is not entirely impaired. Recent brain function studies, including event-related potential and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, have investigated the cognitive process of face recognition in ASD patients, and revealed impaired function in the brain's neural network comprising the fusiform gyrus and amygdala. This impaired function is potentially involved in the diminished preference for faces, and in the atypical development of face recognition, eliciting symptoms of unstable behavioral characteristics in these patients. Additionally, face recognition in ASD patients is examined from a different perspective, namely self-face recognition, and facial emotion recognition. While the former topic is intimately linked to basic social abilities such as self-other discrimination, the latter is closely associated with mentalizing. Further research on face recognition in ASD patients should investigate the connection between behavioral and neurological specifics in these patients, by considering developmental changes and the spectrum clinical condition of ASD.

A blended learning approach to teaching basic pharmacokinetics and the significance of face-to-face interaction.

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Edginton, Andrea; Holbrook, Jane

2010-06-15

To assess pharmacy students' attitudes towards a blended-learning pharmacokinetics course. Narrated visual presentations and animations that illustrated kinetic processes and guided students through the use of software programs used for calculations were created. Other learning techniques used included online self-assessment quizzes, practice problem sets, and weekly face-to-face problem-solving tutorials. A precourse questionnaire to assess students' level of enthusiasm towards the blended-learning course and to solicit any concerns they had was administered at the beginning of the course. A postcourse questionnaire that included the same 4 Likert-scale items from the precourse questionnaire and follow-up open-ended questions was administered. Individual changes in level of enthusiasm were compared for individuals who completed both the precourse and postcourse questionnaire. Students' concerns about the blended method of learning had decreased postcourse while their enthusiasm for the benefits of blended learning had increased. Students' initial concerns about the blended learning experience were focused on their ability to communicate with the instructor about the online components, but shifted to their own time management skills at the end of the course. Face-to-face interactions with each other and with the instructor were more highly rated than online interactions in this course.

Reading the Mind in the Eyes or Reading between the Lines? Theory of Mind Predicts Collective Intelligence Equally Well Online and Face-To-Face

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Engel, David; Woolley, Anita Williams; Jing, Lisa X.; Chabris, Christopher F.; Malone, Thomas W.

2014-01-01

Recent research with face-to-face groups found that a measure of general group effectiveness (called “collective intelligence”) predicted a group’s performance on a wide range of different tasks. The same research also found that collective intelligence was correlated with the individual group members’ ability to reason about the mental states of others (an ability called “Theory of Mind” or “ToM”). Since ToM was measured in this work by a test that requires participants to “read” the mental states of others from looking at their eyes (the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test), it is uncertain whether the same results would emerge in online groups where these visual cues are not available. Here we find that: (1) a collective intelligence factor characterizes group performance approximately as well for online groups as for face-to-face groups; and (2) surprisingly, the ToM measure is equally predictive of collective intelligence in both face-to-face and online groups, even though the online groups communicate only via text and never see each other at all. This provides strong evidence that ToM abilities are just as important to group performance in online environments with limited nonverbal cues as they are face-to-face. It also suggests that the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test measures a deeper, domain-independent aspect of social reasoning, not merely the ability to recognize facial expressions of mental states. PMID:25514387

Is empathy necessary to comprehend the emotional faces? The empathic effect on attentional mechanisms (eye movements), cortical correlates (N200 event-related potentials) and facial behaviour (electromyography) in face processing.

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Balconi, Michela; Canavesio, Ylenia

2016-01-01

The present research explored the effect of social empathy on processing emotional facial expressions. Previous evidence suggested a close relationship between emotional empathy and both the ability to detect facial emotions and the attentional mechanisms involved. A multi-measure approach was adopted: we investigated the association between trait empathy (Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale) and individuals' performance (response times; RTs), attentional mechanisms (eye movements; number and duration of fixations), correlates of cortical activation (event-related potential (ERP) N200 component), and facial responsiveness (facial zygomatic and corrugator activity). Trait empathy was found to affect face detection performance (reduced RTs), attentional processes (more scanning eye movements in specific areas of interest), ERP salience effect (increased N200 amplitude), and electromyographic activity (more facial responses). A second important result was the demonstration of strong, direct correlations among these measures. We suggest that empathy may function as a social facilitator of the processes underlying the detection of facial emotion, and a general "facial response effect" is proposed to explain these results. We assumed that empathy influences cognitive and the facial responsiveness, such that empathic individuals are more skilful in processing facial emotion.

2D Methods for pose invariant face recognition

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Mokoena, Ntabiseng

2016-12-01

Full Text Available The ability to recognise face images under random pose is a task that is done effortlessly by human beings. However, for a computer system, recognising face images under varying poses still remains an open research area. Face recognition across pose...

Do I Have My Attention? Speed of Processing Advantages for the Self-Face Are Not Driven by Automatic Attention Capture

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Keyes, Helen; Dlugokencka, Aleksandra

2014-01-01

We respond more quickly to our own face than to other faces, but there is debate over whether this is connected to attention-grabbing properties of the self-face. In two experiments, we investigate whether the self-face selectively captures attention, and the attentional conditions under which this might occur. In both experiments, we examined whether different types of face (self, friend, stranger) provide differential levels of distraction when processing self, friend and stranger names. In Experiment 1, an image of a distractor face appeared centrally – inside the focus of attention – behind a target name, with the faces either upright or inverted. In Experiment 2, distractor faces appeared peripherally – outside the focus of attention – in the left or right visual field, or bilaterally. In both experiments, self-name recognition was faster than other name recognition, suggesting a self-referential processing advantage. The presence of the self-face did not cause more distraction in the naming task compared to other types of face, either when presented inside (Experiment 1) or outside (Experiment 2) the focus of attention. Distractor faces had different effects across the two experiments: when presented inside the focus of attention (Experiment 1), self and friend images facilitated self and friend naming, respectively. This was not true for stranger stimuli, suggesting that faces must be robustly represented to facilitate name recognition. When presented outside the focus of attention (Experiment 2), no facilitation occurred. Instead, we report an interesting distraction effect caused by friend faces when processing strangers’ names. We interpret this as a “social importance” effect, whereby we may be tuned to pick out and pay attention to familiar friend faces in a crowd. We conclude that any speed of processing advantages observed in the self-face processing literature are not driven by automatic attention capture. PMID:25338170

Putting the face in context: Body expressions impact facial emotion processing in human infants.

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Rajhans, Purva; Jessen, Sarah; Missana, Manuela; Grossmann, Tobias

2016-06-01

Body expressions exert strong contextual effects on facial emotion perception in adults. Specifically, conflicting body cues hamper the recognition of emotion from faces, as evident on both the behavioral and neural level. We examined the developmental origins of the neural processes involved in emotion perception across body and face in 8-month-old infants by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs). We primed infants with body postures (fearful, happy) that were followed by either congruent or incongruent facial expressions. Our results revealed that body expressions impact facial emotion processing and that incongruent body cues impair the neural discrimination of emotional facial expressions. Priming effects were associated with attentional and recognition memory processes, as reflected in a modulation of the Nc and Pc evoked at anterior electrodes. These findings demonstrate that 8-month-old infants possess neural mechanisms that allow for the integration of emotion across body and face, providing evidence for the early developmental emergence of context-sensitive facial emotion perception. Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Hemispheric metacontrol and cerebral dominance in healthy individuals investigated by means of chimeric faces.

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Urgesi, Cosimo; Bricolo, Emanuela; Aglioti, Salvatore M

2005-08-01

Cerebral dominance and hemispheric metacontrol were investigated by testing the ability of healthy participants to match chimeric, entire, or half faces presented tachistoscopically. The two hemi-faces compounding chimeric or entire stimuli were presented simultaneously or asynchronously at different exposure times. Participants did not consciously detect chimeric faces for simultaneous presentations lasting up to 40 ms. Interestingly, a 20 ms separation between each half-chimera was sufficient to induce detection of conflicts at a conscious level. Although the presence of chimeric faces was not consciously perceived, performance on chimeric faces was poorer than on entire- and half-faces stimuli, thus indicating an implicit processing of perceptual conflicts. Moreover, the precedence of hemispheric stimulation over-ruled the right hemisphere dominance for face processing, insofar as the hemisphere stimulated last appeared to influence the response. This dynamic reversal of cerebral dominance, however, was not caused by a shift in hemispheric specialization, since the level of performance always reflected the right hemisphere specialization for face recognition. Thus, the dissociation between hemispheric dominance and specialization found in the present study hints at the existence of hemispheric metacontrol in healthy individuals.

Limited ability driven phase transitions in the coevolution process in Axelrod's model

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Wang, Bing; Han, Yuexing; Chen, Luonan; Aihara, Kazuyuki

2009-04-01

We study the coevolution process in Axelrod's model by taking into account of agents' abilities to access information, which is described by a parameter α to control the geographical range of communication. We observe two kinds of phase transitions in both cultural domains and network fragments, which depend on the parameter α. By simulation, we find that not all rewiring processes pervade the dissemination of culture, that is, a very limited ability to access information constrains the cultural dissemination, while an exceptional ability to access information aids the dissemination of culture. Furthermore, by analyzing the network characteristics at the frozen states, we find that there exists a stage at which the network develops to be a small-world network with community structures.

An application of viola jones method for face recognition for absence process efficiency

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Rizki Damanik, Rudolfo; Sitanggang, Delima; Pasaribu, Hendra; Siagian, Hendrik; Gulo, Frisman

2018-04-01

Absence was a list of documents that the company used to record the attendance time of each employee. The most common problem in a fingerprint machine is the identification of a slow sensor or a sensor not recognizing a finger. The employees late to work because they get difficulties at fingerprint system, they need about 3 – 5 minutes to absence when the condition of finger is wet or not fit. To overcome this problem, this research tried to utilize facial recognition for attendance process. The method used for facial recognition was Viola Jones. Through the processing phase of the RGB face image was converted into a histogram equalization face image for the next stage of recognition. The result of this research was the absence process could be done less than 1 second with a maximum slope of ± 700 and a distance of 20-200 cm. After implement facial recognition the process of absence is more efficient, just take less 1 minute to absence.

No Own-Age Bias in 3-Year-Old Children: More Evidence for the Role of Early Experience in Building Face-Processing Biases

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Cassia, Viola Macchi; Pisacane, Antonella; Gava, Lucia

2012-01-01

This study aimed to investigate the presence of an own-age bias in young children who accumulated different amounts of early experience with child faces. Discrimination abilities for upright and inverted adult and child faces were tested using a delayed two-alternative, forced-choice matching-to-sample task in two groups of 3-year-old children,…

Using effort to measure reward value of faces in children with autism.

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Louise Ewing

Full Text Available According to one influential account, face processing atypicalities in autism reflect reduced reward value of faces, which results in limited attention to faces during development and a consequent failure to acquire face expertise. Surprisingly, however, there is a paucity of work directly investigating the reward value of faces for individuals with autism and the evidence for diminished face rewards in this population remains equivocal. In the current study, we measured how hard children with autism would work to view faces, using an effortful key-press sequence, and whether they were sensitive to the differential reward value of attractive and unattractive faces. Contrary to expectations, cognitively able children with autism did not differ from typically developing children of similar age and ability in their willingness to work to view faces. Moreover, the effort expended was strongly positively correlated with facial attractiveness ratings in both groups of children. There was also no evidence of atypical reward values for other, less social categories (cars and inverted faces in the children with autism. These results speak against the possibility that face recognition difficulties in autism are explained by atypical reward value of faces.

Brain Activity Related to the Judgment of Face-Likeness: Correlation between EEG and Face-Like Evaluation

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Yuji Nihei

2018-02-01

Full Text Available Faces represent important information for social communication, because social information, such as face-color, expression, and gender, is obtained from faces. Therefore, individuals' tend to find faces unconsciously, even in objects. Why is face-likeness perceived in non-face objects? Previous event-related potential (ERP studies showed that the P1 component (early visual processing, the N170 component (face detection, and the N250 component (personal detection reflect the neural processing of faces. Inverted faces were reported to enhance the amplitude and delay the latency of P1 and N170. To investigate face-likeness processing in the brain, we explored the face-related components of the ERP through a face-like evaluation task using natural faces, cars, insects, and Arcimboldo paintings presented upright or inverted. We found a significant correlation between the inversion effect index and face-like scores in P1 in both hemispheres and in N170 in the right hemisphere. These results suggest that judgment of face-likeness occurs in a relatively early stage of face processing.

Brain Activity Related to the Judgment of Face-Likeness: Correlation between EEG and Face-Like Evaluation.

Science.gov (United States)

Nihei, Yuji; Minami, Tetsuto; Nakauchi, Shigeki

2018-01-01

Faces represent important information for social communication, because social information, such as face-color, expression, and gender, is obtained from faces. Therefore, individuals' tend to find faces unconsciously, even in objects. Why is face-likeness perceived in non-face objects? Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies showed that the P1 component (early visual processing), the N170 component (face detection), and the N250 component (personal detection) reflect the neural processing of faces. Inverted faces were reported to enhance the amplitude and delay the latency of P1 and N170. To investigate face-likeness processing in the brain, we explored the face-related components of the ERP through a face-like evaluation task using natural faces, cars, insects, and Arcimboldo paintings presented upright or inverted. We found a significant correlation between the inversion effect index and face-like scores in P1 in both hemispheres and in N170 in the right hemisphere. These results suggest that judgment of face-likeness occurs in a relatively early stage of face processing.

Race perception and gaze direction differently impair visual working memory for faces: An event-related potential study.

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Sessa, Paola; Dalmaso, Mario

2016-01-01

Humans are amazingly experts at processing and recognizing faces, however there are moderating factors of this ability. In the present study, we used the event-related potential technique to investigate the influence of both race and gaze direction on visual working memory (i.e., VWM) face representations. In a change detection task, we orthogonally manipulated race (own-race vs. other-race faces) and eye-gaze direction (direct gaze vs. averted gaze). Participants were required to encode identities of these faces. We quantified the amount of information encoded in VWM by monitoring the amplitude of the sustained posterior contralateral negativity (SPCN) time-locked to the faces. Notably, race and eye-gaze direction differently modulated SPCN amplitude such that other-race faces elicited reduced SPCN amplitudes compared with own-race faces only when displaying a direct gaze. On the other hand, faces displaying averted gaze, independently of their race, elicited increased SPCN amplitudes compared with faces displaying direct gaze. We interpret these findings as denoting that race and eye-gaze direction affect different face processing stages.

Eye-movement strategies in developmental prosopagnosia and "super" face recognition.

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Bobak, Anna K; Parris, Benjamin A; Gregory, Nicola J; Bennetts, Rachel J; Bate, Sarah

2017-02-01

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a cognitive condition characterized by a severe deficit in face recognition. Few investigations have examined whether impairments at the early stages of processing may underpin the condition, and it is also unknown whether DP is simply the "bottom end" of the typical face-processing spectrum. To address these issues, we monitored the eye-movements of DPs, typical perceivers, and "super recognizers" (SRs) while they viewed a set of static images displaying people engaged in naturalistic social scenarios. Three key findings emerged: (a) Individuals with more severe prosopagnosia spent less time examining the internal facial region, (b) as observed in acquired prosopagnosia, some DPs spent less time examining the eyes and more time examining the mouth than controls, and (c) SRs spent more time examining the nose-a measure that also correlated with face recognition ability in controls. These findings support previous suggestions that DP is a heterogeneous condition, but suggest that at least the most severe cases represent a group of individuals that qualitatively differ from the typical population. While SRs seem to merely be those at the "top end" of normal, this work identifies the nose as a critical region for successful face recognition.

How Mode of Delivery Affects Comprehension of an Operations Management Simulation: Online vs Face-to-Face Classrooms

Science.gov (United States)

Riley, Jason M.; Ellegood, William A.; Solomon, Stanislaus; Baker, Jerrine

2017-01-01

Purpose: This study aims to understand how mode of delivery, online versus face-to-face, affects comprehension when teaching operations management concepts via a simulation. Conceptually, the aim is to identify factors that influence the students' ability to learn and retain new concepts. Design/methodology/approach: Leveraging Littlefield…

Face identity recognition in autism spectrum disorders: a review of behavioral studies.

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Weigelt, Sarah; Koldewyn, Kami; Kanwisher, Nancy

2012-03-01

Face recognition--the ability to recognize a person from their facial appearance--is essential for normal social interaction. Face recognition deficits have been implicated in the most common disorder of social interaction: autism. Here we ask: is face identity recognition in fact impaired in people with autism? Reviewing behavioral studies we find no strong evidence for a qualitative difference in how facial identity is processed between those with and without autism: markers of typical face identity recognition, such as the face inversion effect, seem to be present in people with autism. However, quantitatively--i.e., how well facial identity is remembered or discriminated--people with autism perform worse than typical individuals. This impairment is particularly clear in face memory and in face perception tasks in which a delay intervenes between sample and test, and less so in tasks with no memory demand. Although some evidence suggests that this deficit may be specific to faces, further evidence on this question is necessary. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abnormal brain activation during threatening face processing in schizophrenia: A meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies.

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Dong, Debo; Wang, Yulin; Jia, Xiaoyan; Li, Yingjia; Chang, Xuebin; Vandekerckhove, Marie; Luo, Cheng; Yao, Dezhong

2017-11-15

Impairment of face perception in schizophrenia is a core aspect of social cognitive dysfunction. This impairment is particularly marked in threatening face processing. Identifying reliable neural correlates of the impairment of threatening face processing is crucial for targeting more effective treatments. However, neuroimaging studies have not yet obtained robust conclusions. Through comprehensive literature search, twenty-one whole brain datasets were included in this meta-analysis. Using seed-based d-Mapping, in this voxel-based meta-analysis, we aimed to: 1) establish the most consistent brain dysfunctions related to threating face processing in schizophrenia; 2) address task-type heterogeneity in this impairment; 3) explore the effect of potential demographic or clinical moderator variables on this impairment. Main meta-analysis indicated that patients with chronic schizophrenia demonstrated attenuated activations in limbic emotional system along with compensatory over-activation in medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) during threatening faces processing. Sub-task analyses revealed under-activations in right amygdala and left fusiform gyrus in both implicit and explicit tasks. The remaining clusters were found to be differently involved in different types of tasks. Moreover, meta-regression analyses showed brain abnormalities in schizophrenia were partly modulated by age, gender, medication and severity of symptoms. Our results highlighted breakdowns in limbic-MPFC circuit in schizophrenia, suggesting general inability to coordinate and contextualize salient threat stimuli. These findings provide potential targets for neurotherapeutic and pharmacological interventions for schizophrenia. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Oxytocin Reduces Face Processing Time but Leaves Recognition Accuracy and Eye-Gaze Unaffected.

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Hubble, Kelly; Daughters, Katie; Manstead, Antony S R; Rees, Aled; Thapar, Anita; van Goozen, Stephanie H M

2017-01-01

Previous studies have found that oxytocin (OXT) can improve the recognition of emotional facial expressions; it has been proposed that this effect is mediated by an increase in attention to the eye-region of faces. Nevertheless, evidence in support of this claim is inconsistent, and few studies have directly tested the effect of oxytocin on emotion recognition via altered eye-gaze Methods: In a double-blind, within-subjects, randomized control experiment, 40 healthy male participants received 24 IU intranasal OXT and placebo in two identical experimental sessions separated by a 2-week interval. Visual attention to the eye-region was assessed on both occasions while participants completed a static facial emotion recognition task using medium intensity facial expressions. Although OXT had no effect on emotion recognition accuracy, recognition performance was improved because face processing was faster across emotions under the influence of OXT. This effect was marginally significant (pfaces and this was not related to recognition accuracy or face processing time. These findings suggest that OXT-induced enhanced facial emotion recognition is not necessarily mediated by an increase in attention to the eye-region of faces, as previously assumed. We discuss several methodological issues which may explain discrepant findings and suggest the effect of OXT on visual attention may differ depending on task requirements. (JINS, 2017, 23, 23-33).

Exploring the effects of antisocial personality traits on brain potentials during face processing.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Daniela M Pfabigan

Full Text Available Antisocial individuals are characterized to display self-determined and inconsiderate behavior during social interaction. Furthermore, recognition deficits regarding fearful facial expressions have been observed in antisocial populations. These observations give rise to the question whether or not antisocial behavioral tendencies are associated with deficits in basic processing of social cues. The present study investigated early visual stimulus processing of social stimuli in a group of healthy female individuals with antisocial behavioral tendencies compared to individuals without these tendencies while measuring event-related potentials (P1, N170. To this end, happy and angry faces served as feedback stimuli which were embedded in a gambling task. Results showed processing differences as early as 88-120 ms after feedback onset. Participants low on antisocial traits displayed larger P1 amplitudes than participants high on antisocial traits. No group differences emerged for N170 amplitudes. Attention allocation processes, individual arousal levels as well as face processing are discussed as possible causes of the observed group differences in P1 amplitudes. In summary, the current data suggest that sensory processing of facial stimuli is functionally intact but less ready to respond in healthy individuals with antisocial tendencies.

Development of Facial Rejuvenation Procedures: Thirty Years of Clinical Experience with Face Lifts

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Byung Jun Kim

2015-09-01

Full Text Available Facial rejuvenation procedures can be roughly divided into face lift surgery and nonoperative, less invasive procedures, such as fat grafts, fillers, botulinum toxin injections, thread lifts, or laserbrasion. Face lift surgery or rhytidectomy is the procedure most directly associated with rejuvenation, due to its fundamental ability to restore the anatomical changes caused by aging. Various methods of face lift surgery have been developed over the last hundred years, thanks to advances in the understanding of facial anatomy and the mechanisms of aging, as well as the dedication of innovative surgeons. However, no generally applicable standard method exists, because the condition of each patient is different, and each operative method has advantages and disadvantages. Specific characteristics of the skin of Asians and their skeletal anatomy should be considered when determining the operative method to be used on Asian patients. Plastic surgeons should improve their ability to analyze the original aesthetic properties and problem areas of each patient, drawing on scientific knowledge about the aging process, and they should develop the skills necessary to perform various rejuvenative techniques. In the present article, we reviewed various face lift procedures and the current methods of modified double plane face lift, based on our clinical experience of over 30 years.

Electrophysiological correlates of emotional face processing in typically developing adults and adults with high functioning Autism

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Barrie, Jennifer Nicole

2012-01-01

Emotional expressions have been found to affect various event-related potentials (ERPs). Furthermore, socio-emotional functioning is altered in individuals with autism, and a growing body of neuroimaging and electrophysiological evidence substantiates underlying neural differences for face processing in this population. However, relatively few studies have examined the time-course of emotional face processing in autism. This study examined how implicit (not the intended focus of attention) ve...

The Face-to-Face Light Detection Paradigm: A New Methodology for Investigating Visuospatial Attention Across Different Face Regions in Live Face-to-Face Communication Settings.

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Thompson, Laura A; Malloy, Daniel M; Cone, John M; Hendrickson, David L

2010-01-01

We introduce a novel paradigm for studying the cognitive processes used by listeners within interactive settings. This paradigm places the talker and the listener in the same physical space, creating opportunities for investigations of attention and comprehension processes taking place during interactive discourse situations. An experiment was conducted to compare results from previous research using videotaped stimuli to those obtained within the live face-to-face task paradigm. A headworn apparatus is used to briefly display LEDs on the talker's face in four locations as the talker communicates with the participant. In addition to the primary task of comprehending speeches, participants make a secondary task light detection response. In the present experiment, the talker gave non-emotionally-expressive speeches that were used in past research with videotaped stimuli. Signal detection analysis was employed to determine which areas of the face received the greatest focus of attention. Results replicate previous findings using videotaped methods.

The Role of Cognitive Ability and Preferred Mode of Processing in Students' Calculus Performance

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Haciomeroglu, Erhan Selcuk

2015-01-01

The present study sought to design calculus tasks to determine students' preference for visual or analytic processing as well as examine the role of preferred mode of processing in calculus performance and its relationship to spatial ability and verbal-logical reasoning ability. Data were collected from 150 high school students who were enrolled…

Face recognition increases during saccade preparation.

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Lin, Hai; Rizak, Joshua D; Ma, Yuan-ye; Yang, Shang-chuan; Chen, Lin; Hu, Xin-tian

2014-01-01

Face perception is integral to human perception system as it underlies social interactions. Saccadic eye movements are frequently made to bring interesting visual information, such as faces, onto the fovea for detailed processing. Just before eye movement onset, the processing of some basic features, such as the orientation, of an object improves at the saccade landing point. Interestingly, there is also evidence that indicates faces are processed in early visual processing stages similar to basic features. However, it is not known whether this early enhancement of processing includes face recognition. In this study, three experiments were performed to map the timing of face presentation to the beginning of the eye movement in order to evaluate pre-saccadic face recognition. Faces were found to be similarly processed as simple objects immediately prior to saccadic movements. Starting ∼ 120 ms before a saccade to a target face, independent of whether or not the face was surrounded by other faces, the face recognition gradually improved and the critical spacing of the crowding decreased as saccade onset was approaching. These results suggest that an upcoming saccade prepares the visual system for new information about faces at the saccade landing site and may reduce the background in a crowd to target the intended face. This indicates an important role of pre-saccadic eye movement signals in human face recognition.

Featural versus configural face processing in a rare genetic disorder: Williams syndrome

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Isaac, L.; Lincoln, A.

2011-01-01

Background Williams syndrome (WMS) is a rare genetic disorder with an estimated prevalence of 1 in 20 000 live births. Among other characteristics, WMS has a distinctive cognitive profile with spared face processing and language skills that contrasts with impairment in the cognitive domains of

A mixture of sparse coding models explaining properties of face neurons related to holistic and parts-based processing.

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Haruo Hosoya

2017-07-01

Full Text Available Experimental studies have revealed evidence of both parts-based and holistic representations of objects and faces in the primate visual system. However, it is still a mystery how such seemingly contradictory types of processing can coexist within a single system. Here, we propose a novel theory called mixture of sparse coding models, inspired by the formation of category-specific subregions in the inferotemporal (IT cortex. We developed a hierarchical network that constructed a mixture of two sparse coding submodels on top of a simple Gabor analysis. The submodels were each trained with face or non-face object images, which resulted in separate representations of facial parts and object parts. Importantly, evoked neural activities were modeled by Bayesian inference, which had a top-down explaining-away effect that enabled recognition of an individual part to depend strongly on the category of the whole input. We show that this explaining-away effect was indeed crucial for the units in the face submodel to exhibit significant selectivity to face images over object images in a similar way to actual face-selective neurons in the macaque IT cortex. Furthermore, the model explained, qualitatively and quantitatively, several tuning properties to facial features found in the middle patch of face processing in IT as documented by Freiwald, Tsao, and Livingstone (2009. These included, in particular, tuning to only a small number of facial features that were often related to geometrically large parts like face outline and hair, preference and anti-preference of extreme facial features (e.g., very large/small inter-eye distance, and reduction of the gain of feature tuning for partial face stimuli compared to whole face stimuli. Thus, we hypothesize that the coding principle of facial features in the middle patch of face processing in the macaque IT cortex may be closely related to mixture of sparse coding models.

Following the time course of face gender and expression processing: a task-dependent ERP study.

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Valdés-Conroy, Berenice; Aguado, Luis; Fernández-Cahill, María; Romero-Ferreiro, Verónica; Diéguez-Risco, Teresa

2014-05-01

The effects of task demands and the interaction between gender and expression in face perception were studied using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants performed three different tasks with male and female faces that were emotionally inexpressive or that showed happy or angry expressions. In two of the tasks (gender and expression categorization) facial properties were task-relevant while in a third task (symbol discrimination) facial information was irrelevant. Effects of expression were observed on the visual P100 component under all task conditions, suggesting the operation of an automatic process that is not influenced by task demands. The earliest interaction between expression and gender was observed later in the face-sensitive N170 component. This component showed differential modulations by specific combinations of gender and expression (e.g., angry male vs. angry female faces). Main effects of expression and task were observed in a later occipito-temporal component peaking around 230 ms post-stimulus onset (EPN or early posterior negativity). Less positive amplitudes in the presence of angry faces and during performance of the gender and expression tasks were observed. Finally, task demands also modulated a positive component peaking around 400 ms (LPC, or late positive complex) that showed enhanced amplitude for the gender task. The pattern of results obtained here adds new evidence about the sequence of operations involved in face processing and the interaction of facial properties (gender and expression) in response to different task demands. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Exploring the unconscious using faces.

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Axelrod, Vadim; Bar, Moshe; Rees, Geraint

2015-01-01

Understanding the mechanisms of unconscious processing is one of the most substantial endeavors of cognitive science. While there are many different empirical ways to address this question, the use of faces in such research has proven exceptionally fruitful. We review here what has been learned about unconscious processing through the use of faces and face-selective neural correlates. A large number of cognitive systems can be explored with faces, including emotions, social cueing and evaluation, attention, multisensory integration, and various aspects of face processing. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Spatiotemporal brain dynamics of emotional face processing modulations induced by the serotonin 1A/2A receptor agonist psilocybin.

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Bernasconi, Fosco; Schmidt, André; Pokorny, Thomas; Kometer, Michael; Seifritz, Erich; Vollenweider, Franz X

2014-12-01

Emotional face processing is critically modulated by the serotonergic system. For instance, emotional face processing is impaired by acute psilocybin administration, a serotonin (5-HT) 1A and 2A receptor agonist. However, the spatiotemporal brain mechanisms underlying these modulations are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the spatiotemporal brain dynamics underlying psilocybin-induced modulations during emotional face processing. Electrical neuroimaging analyses were applied to visual evoked potentials in response to emotional faces, following psilocybin and placebo administration. Our results indicate a first time period of strength (i.e., Global Field Power) modulation over the 168-189 ms poststimulus interval, induced by psilocybin. A second time period of strength modulation was identified over the 211-242 ms poststimulus interval. Source estimations over these 2 time periods further revealed decreased activity in response to both neutral and fearful faces within limbic areas, including amygdala and parahippocampal gyrus, and the right temporal cortex over the 168-189 ms interval, and reduced activity in response to happy faces within limbic and right temporo-occipital brain areas over the 211-242 ms interval. Our results indicate a selective and temporally dissociable effect of psilocybin on the neuronal correlates of emotional face processing, consistent with a modulation of the top-down control. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Energy conservation using face detection

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Deotale, Nilesh T.; Kalbande, Dhananjay R.; Mishra, Akassh A.

2011-10-01

Computerized Face Detection, is concerned with the difficult task of converting a video signal of a person to written text. It has several applications like face recognition, simultaneous multiple face processing, biometrics, security, video surveillance, human computer interface, image database management, digital cameras use face detection for autofocus, selecting regions of interest in photo slideshows that use a pan-and-scale and The Present Paper deals with energy conservation using face detection. Automating the process to a computer requires the use of various image processing techniques. There are various methods that can be used for Face Detection such as Contour tracking methods, Template matching, Controlled background, Model based, Motion based and color based. Basically, the video of the subject are converted into images are further selected manually for processing. However, several factors like poor illumination, movement of face, viewpoint-dependent Physical appearance, Acquisition geometry, Imaging conditions, Compression artifacts makes Face detection difficult. This paper reports an algorithm for conservation of energy using face detection for various devices. The present paper suggests Energy Conservation can be done by Detecting the Face and reducing the brightness of complete image and then adjusting the brightness of the particular area of an image where the face is located using histogram equalization.

Neural activation to emotional faces in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders.

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Weng, Shih-Jen; Carrasco, Melisa; Swartz, Johnna R; Wiggins, Jillian Lee; Kurapati, Nikhil; Liberzon, Israel; Risi, Susan; Lord, Catherine; Monk, Christopher S

2011-03-01

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) involve a core deficit in social functioning and impairments in the ability to recognize face emotions. In an emotional faces task designed to constrain group differences in attention, the present study used functional MRI to characterize activation in the amygdala, ventral prefrontal cortex (vPFC), and striatum, three structures involved in socio-emotional processing in adolescents with ASD. Twenty-two adolescents with ASD and 20 healthy adolescents viewed facial expressions (happy, fearful, sad and neutral) that were briefly presented (250 ms) during functional MRI acquisition. To monitor attention, subjects pressed a button to identify the gender of each face. The ASD group showed greater activation to the faces relative to the control group in the amygdala, vPFC and striatum. Follow-up analyses indicated that the ASD relative to control group showed greater activation in the amygdala, vPFC and striatum (p gender identification task. When group differences in attention to facial expressions were limited, adolescents with ASD showed greater activation in structures involved in socio-emotional processing. © 2010 The Authors. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry © 2010 Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.

Gaze Cueing by Pareidolia Faces

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Kohske Takahashi

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Visual images that are not faces are sometimes perceived as faces (the pareidolia phenomenon. While the pareidolia phenomenon provides people with a strong impression that a face is present, it is unclear how deeply pareidolia faces are processed as faces. In the present study, we examined whether a shift in spatial attention would be produced by gaze cueing of face-like objects. A robust cueing effect was observed when the face-like objects were perceived as faces. The magnitude of the cueing effect was comparable between the face-like objects and a cartoon face. However, the cueing effect was eliminated when the observer did not perceive the objects as faces. These results demonstrated that pareidolia faces do more than give the impression of the presence of faces; indeed, they trigger an additional face-specific attentional process.

Gaze cueing by pareidolia faces.

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Takahashi, Kohske; Watanabe, Katsumi

2013-01-01

Visual images that are not faces are sometimes perceived as faces (the pareidolia phenomenon). While the pareidolia phenomenon provides people with a strong impression that a face is present, it is unclear how deeply pareidolia faces are processed as faces. In the present study, we examined whether a shift in spatial attention would be produced by gaze cueing of face-like objects. A robust cueing effect was observed when the face-like objects were perceived as faces. The magnitude of the cueing effect was comparable between the face-like objects and a cartoon face. However, the cueing effect was eliminated when the observer did not perceive the objects as faces. These results demonstrated that pareidolia faces do more than give the impression of the presence of faces; indeed, they trigger an additional face-specific attentional process.

The extended functional neuroanatomy of emotional processing biases for masked faces in major depressive disorder.

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Teresa A Victor

Full Text Available Major depressive disorder (MDD is associated with a mood-congruent processing bias in the amygdala toward face stimuli portraying sad expressions that is evident even when such stimuli are presented below the level of conscious awareness. The extended functional anatomical network that maintains this response bias has not been established, however.To identify neural network differences in the hemodynamic response to implicitly presented facial expressions between depressed and healthy control participants.Unmedicated-depressed participants with MDD (n=22 and healthy controls (HC; n=25 underwent functional MRI as they viewed face stimuli showing sad, happy or neutral face expressions, presented using a backward masking design. The blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD signal was measured to identify regions where the hemodynamic response to the emotionally valenced stimuli differed between groups.The MDD subjects showed greater BOLD responses than the controls to masked-sad versus masked-happy faces in the hippocampus, amygdala and anterior inferotemporal cortex. While viewing both masked-sad and masked-happy faces relative to masked-neutral faces, the depressed subjects showed greater hemodynamic responses than the controls in a network that included the medial and orbital prefrontal cortices and anterior temporal cortex.Depressed and healthy participants showed distinct hemodynamic responses to masked-sad and masked-happy faces in neural circuits known to support the processing of emotionally valenced stimuli and to integrate the sensory and visceromotor aspects of emotional behavior. Altered function within these networks in MDD may establish and maintain illness-associated differences in the salience of sensory/social stimuli, such that attention is biased toward negative and away from positive stimuli.

The extended functional neuroanatomy of emotional processing biases for masked faces in major depressive disorder.

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Victor, Teresa A; Furey, Maura L; Fromm, Stephen J; Bellgowan, Patrick S F; Öhman, Arne; Drevets, Wayne C

2012-01-01

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with a mood-congruent processing bias in the amygdala toward face stimuli portraying sad expressions that is evident even when such stimuli are presented below the level of conscious awareness. The extended functional anatomical network that maintains this response bias has not been established, however. To identify neural network differences in the hemodynamic response to implicitly presented facial expressions between depressed and healthy control participants. Unmedicated-depressed participants with MDD (n=22) and healthy controls (HC; n=25) underwent functional MRI as they viewed face stimuli showing sad, happy or neutral face expressions, presented using a backward masking design. The blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signal was measured to identify regions where the hemodynamic response to the emotionally valenced stimuli differed between groups. The MDD subjects showed greater BOLD responses than the controls to masked-sad versus masked-happy faces in the hippocampus, amygdala and anterior inferotemporal cortex. While viewing both masked-sad and masked-happy faces relative to masked-neutral faces, the depressed subjects showed greater hemodynamic responses than the controls in a network that included the medial and orbital prefrontal cortices and anterior temporal cortex. Depressed and healthy participants showed distinct hemodynamic responses to masked-sad and masked-happy faces in neural circuits known to support the processing of emotionally valenced stimuli and to integrate the sensory and visceromotor aspects of emotional behavior. Altered function within these networks in MDD may establish and maintain illness-associated differences in the salience of sensory/social stimuli, such that attention is biased toward negative and away from positive stimuli.

DEVELOPMENT OF COORDINATION ABILITIES OF SPECIAL MEDICAL GROUPS STUDENTS IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION PROCESS

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E. N. Dotsenko

2013-08-01

Full Text Available Purpose. To analyze the problem of motor abilities development and health of students of special medical group in the process of physical education in technical universities. Determine the major factors, characteristics, and the relationship of physical development, physical fitness and coordination abilities of female students in special medical group. Establish regularities in precise movements mastering of different coordination structure and develop model characteristics of the relationship of coordination abilities and motor characteristics of students in special medical group. To substantiate and verify efficiency of coordination abilities development method of female students with regard to their functional status in the course of physical education in higher school. Methodology. Theoretical and methodological argument, characteristic of the experimental program in physical education teaching process of students in special medical group was shown. Findings. Research is to develop the training content in special medical groups with the use of coordinating elements and exercises to enhance the motor abilities of female students. Their influence on the level of physical development, functional training, as well as regularities in mastering and movement control of different coordinating structure at the female students of special medical group was studied. The comparative characteristic of female students athletic ability in the dynamics of the educational process, differentiated into groups according to nosology was presented. The criterion of spare capacities upgrade of the motor system in controlling the movements of different coordination structure was determined. Originality. The method of coordination abilities development of female students in special medical group, that aims on the formation and correction of motor control system of different coordination structure, a sense of body position and its individual parts in space, improving

Relationship of mindful awareness to neural processing of angry faces and impact of mindfulness training: A pilot investigation.

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Lee, Athene K W; Gansler, David A; Zhang, Nanyin; Jerram, Matthew W; King, Jean A; Fulwiler, Carl

2017-06-30

Mindfulness is paying attention, non-judgmentally, to experience in the moment. Mindfulness training reduces depression and anxiety and influences neural processes in midline self-referential and lateralized somatosensory and executive networks. Although mindfulness benefits emotion regulation, less is known about its relationship to anger and the corresponding neural correlates. This study examined the relationship of mindful awareness and brain hemodynamics of angry face processing, and the impact of mindfulness training. Eighteen healthy volunteers completed an angry face processing fMRI paradigm and measurement of mindfulness and anger traits. Ten of these participants were recruited from a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) class and also completed imaging and other assessments post-training. Self-reported mindful awareness increased after MBSR, but trait anger did not change. Baseline mindful awareness was negatively related to left inferior parietal lobule activation to angry faces; trait anger was positively related to right middle frontal gyrus and bilateral angular gyrus. No significant pre-post changes in angry face processing were found, but changes in trait mindful awareness and anger were associated with sub-threshold differences in paralimbic activation. These preliminary and hypothesis-generating findings, suggest the analysis of possible impact of mindfulness training on anger may begin with individual differences in angry face processing. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Withholding response to self-face is faster than to other-face.

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Zhu, Min; Hu, Yinying; Tang, Xiaochen; Luo, Junlong; Gao, Xiangping

2015-01-01

Self-face advantage refers to adults' response to self-face is faster than that to other-face. A stop-signal task was used to explore how self-face advantage interacted with response inhibition. The results showed that reaction times of self-face were faster than that of other-face not in the go task but in the stop response trials. The novelty of the finding was that self-face has shorter stop-signal reaction time compared to other-face in the successful inhibition trials. These results indicated the processing mechanism of self-face may be characterized by a strong response tendency and a corresponding strong inhibition control.

Face Emotion Processing in Depressed Children and Adolescents with and without Comorbid Conduct Disorder

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Schepman, Karen; Taylor, Eric; Collishaw, Stephan; Fombonne, Eric

2012-01-01

Studies of adults with depression point to characteristic neurocognitive deficits, including differences in processing facial expressions. Few studies have examined face processing in juvenile depression, or taken account of other comorbid disorders. Three groups were compared: depressed children and adolescents with conduct disorder (n = 23),…

Efficient human face detection in infancy.

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Jakobsen, Krisztina V; Umstead, Lindsey; Simpson, Elizabeth A

2016-01-01

Adults detect conspecific faces more efficiently than heterospecific faces; however, the development of this own-species bias (OSB) remains unexplored. We tested whether 6- and 11-month-olds exhibit OSB in their attention to human and animal faces in complex visual displays with high perceptual load (25 images competing for attention). Infants (n = 48) and adults (n = 43) passively viewed arrays containing a face among 24 non-face distractors while we measured their gaze with remote eye tracking. While OSB is typically not observed until about 9 months, we found that, already by 6 months, human faces were more likely to be detected, were detected more quickly (attention capture), and received longer looks (attention holding) than animal faces. These data suggest that 6-month-olds already exhibit OSB in face detection efficiency, consistent with perceptual attunement. This specialization may reflect the biological importance of detecting conspecific faces, a foundational ability for early social interactions. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Doctor-patient communication: a comparison between telemedicine consultation and face-to-face consultation.

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Liu, Xiao; Sawada, Yoshie; Takizawa, Takako; Sato, Hiroko; Sato, Mahito; Sakamoto, Hironosuke; Utsugi, Toshihiro; Sato, Kunio; Sumino, Hiroyuki; Okamura, Shinichi; Sakamaki, Tetsuo

2007-01-01

The objective of this study was to compare doctor-patient communications in clinical consultations via telemedicine technology to doctor-patient communications in face-to-face clinical consultations. Five doctors who had been practicing internal medicine for 8 to 18 years, and twenty patients were enrolled in this study; neither doctors nor patients had previous experience of telemedicine. The patients received both a telemedicine consultation and a face-to-face consultation. Three measures--video observation, medical record volume, and participants' satisfaction--were used for the assessment. It was found that the time spent on the telemedicine consultation was substantially longer than the time spent on the face-to-face consultation. No statistically significant differences were found in the number of either closed or open-ended questions asked by doctors between both types of consultation. Empathy-utterances, praise-utterances, and facilitation-utterances were, however, seen less in the telemedicine consultations than in the face-to-face consultations. The volume of the medical records was statistically smaller in the telemedicine consultations than in the face-to-face consultations. Patients were satisfied with the telemedicine consultation, but doctors were dissatisfied with it and felt hampered by the communication barriers. This study suggests that new training programs are needed for doctors to develop improved communication skills and the ability to express empathy in telemedicine consultations.

A Systems View of Mother-Infant Face-to-Face Communication

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Beebe, Beatrice; Messinger, Daniel; Bahrick, Lorraine E.; Margolis, Amy; Buck, Karen A.; Chen, Henian

2016-01-01

Principles of a dynamic, dyadic systems view of mother-infant face-to-face communication, which considers self- and interactive processes in relation to one another, were tested. The process of interaction across time in a large low-risk community sample at infant age 4 months was examined. Split-screen videotape was coded on a 1-s time base for…

Weighted piecewise LDA for solving the small sample size problem in face verification.

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Kyperountas, Marios; Tefas, Anastasios; Pitas, Ioannis

2007-03-01

A novel algorithm that can be used to boost the performance of face-verification methods that utilize Fisher's criterion is presented and evaluated. The algorithm is applied to similarity, or matching error, data and provides a general solution for overcoming the "small sample size" (SSS) problem, where the lack of sufficient training samples causes improper estimation of a linear separation hyperplane between the classes. Two independent phases constitute the proposed method. Initially, a set of weighted piecewise discriminant hyperplanes are used in order to provide a more accurate discriminant decision than the one produced by the traditional linear discriminant analysis (LDA) methodology. The expected classification ability of this method is investigated throughout a series of simulations. The second phase defines proper combinations for person-specific similarity scores and describes an outlier removal process that further enhances the classification ability. The proposed technique has been tested on the M2VTS and XM2VTS frontal face databases. Experimental results indicate that the proposed framework greatly improves the face-verification performance.

On the specificity of face cognition compared with general cognitive functioning across adult age.

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Hildebrandt, Andrea; Wilhelm, Oliver; Schmiedek, Florian; Herzmann, Grit; Sommer, Werner

2011-09-01

Face cognition is considered a specific human ability, clearly differentiable from general cognitive functioning. Its specificity is primarily supported by cognitive-experimental and neuroimaging research, but recently also from an individual differences perspective. However, no comprehensive behavioral data are available, which would allow estimating lifespan changes of the covariance structure of face-cognition abilities and general cognitive functioning as well as age-differences in face cognition after accounting for interindividual variability in general cognition. The present study aimed to fill this gap. In an age-heterogeneous (18-82 years) sample of 448 adults, we found no factorial dedifferentiation between face cognition and general cognition. Age-related differences in face memory were still salient after taking into account changes in general cognitive functioning. Face cognition thus remains a specific human ability compared with general cognition, even until old age. We discuss implications for models of cognitive aging and suggest that it is necessary to include more explicitly special social abilities in those models.

THE EFFECT MODEL INQUIRY TRAINING MEDIA AND LOGICAL THINKING ABILITY TO STUDENT’S SCIENCE PROCESS SKILL

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Dahrim Pohan

2017-06-01

Full Text Available The aim of the research is to analyz : student’s science process skill using inquiry training learning model is better than konvesional learning.Student’s science process skill who have logical thinking ability above average are better than under average,and the interaction between inquiry training media and logical thinking ability to increase student’s science process skill.The experiment was conducted in SMP 6 Medan as population and class VII-K and VII-J were chosen as sample through cluster random sampling.Science prosess skill used essay test and logical thinking used multiple choice as instrument.Result of the data was analyzed by using two ways ANAVA.Result show that : student’s science process skill using inquiry training learning model is better than konvesional learning,student’s science process skill who logical thinking ability above average are better than under average and the interaction between inquiry training learning model media and logical thinking ability to increase student’s science process skill.

Improvement of the Shock Absorption Ability of a Face Guard by Incorporating a Glass-Fiber-Reinforced Thermoplastic and Buffering Space

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Takahiro Wada

2018-01-01

Full Text Available This study aimed to evaluate the shock absorption ability of trial face guards (FGs incorporating a glass-fiber-reinforced thermoplastic (GF and buffering space. The mechanical properties of 3.2 mm and 1.6 mm thick commercial medical splint materials (Aquaplast, AP and experimental GF prepared from 1.6 mm thick AP and fiberglass cloth were determined by a three-point bending test. Shock absorption tests were conducted on APs with two different thicknesses and two types of experimental materials, both with a bottom material of 1.6 mm thick AP and a buffering space of 30 mm in diameter (APS and with either (i 1.6 mm thick AP (AP-APS or (ii  1.6 mm thick GF (GF-APS covering the APS. The GF exhibited significantly higher flexural strength (64.4 MPa and flexural modulus (7.53 GPa than the commercial specimens. The maximum load of GF-APS was 75% that of 3.2 mm AP, which is widely used clinically. The maximum stress of the GF-APS only could not be determined as its maximum stress is below the limits of the analysis materials used (<0.5 MPa. Incorporating a GF and buffering space would enhance the shock absorption ability; thus, the shock absorption ability increased while the total thickness and weight decreased.

Examination of program exposure across intervention delivery modes: face-to-face versus internet

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Mummery W Kerry

2007-03-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background There has been increasing interest in the ability of the internet to produce behaviour change. The focus of this study was to describe program exposure across three intervention groups from a randomised trial (RT comparing traditional face-to-face, internet-mediated (combined internet plus face-to-face, and internet-only program delivery. Methods Baseline and immediately post-intervention survey data, and exposure rates from participants that commenced the RT were included (n = 192. Exposure was defined as either face-to-face attendance, website usage, or a combination of both for the internet-mediated group. Characteristics of participants who were exposed to at least 75% of the program material were explored. Descriptive analysis and logistical regression were used to examine differences between groups for program exposure. Results All groups showed decrease in program exposure over time. Differences were also observed (χ2 = 10.37, p Conclusion These results suggest that the internet groups were as effective as the face-to-face delivery mode in engaging participants in the program material. However, different delivery methods may be more useful to different sub-populations. It is important to explore which target groups that internet-based programs are best suited, in order to increase their impact.

Emotion Words: Adding Face Value.

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Fugate, Jennifer M B; Gendron, Maria; Nakashima, Satoshi F; Barrett, Lisa Feldman

2017-06-12

Despite a growing number of studies suggesting that emotion words affect perceptual judgments of emotional stimuli, little is known about how emotion words affect perceptual memory for emotional faces. In Experiments 1 and 2 we tested how emotion words (compared with control words) affected participants' abilities to select a target emotional face from among distractor faces. Participants were generally more likely to false alarm to distractor emotional faces when primed with an emotion word congruent with the face (compared with a control word). Moreover, participants showed both decreased sensitivity (d') to discriminate between target and distractor faces, as well as altered response biases (c; more likely to answer "yes") when primed with an emotion word (compared with a control word). In Experiment 3 we showed that emotion words had more of an effect on perceptual memory judgments when the structural information in the target face was limited, as well as when participants were only able to categorize the face with a partially congruent emotion word. The overall results are consistent with the idea that emotion words affect the encoding of emotional faces in perceptual memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Perceptual Learning: 12-Month-Olds' Discrimination of Monkey Faces

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Fair, Joseph; Flom, Ross; Jones, Jacob; Martin, Justin

2012-01-01

Six-month-olds reliably discriminate different monkey and human faces whereas 9-month-olds only discriminate different human faces. It is often falsely assumed that perceptual narrowing reflects a permanent change in perceptual abilities. In 3 experiments, ninety-six 12-month-olds' discrimination of unfamiliar monkey faces was examined. Following…

Face Gear Technology for Aerospace Power Transmission Progresses

Science.gov (United States)

2005-01-01

The use of face gears in an advanced rotorcraft transmission design was first proposed by the McDonnell Douglas Helicopter Company during their contracted effort with the U.S. Army under the Advanced Rotorcraft Transmission (ART) program. Face gears would be used to turn the corner between the horizontal gas turbine engine and the vertical output rotor shaft--a function currently done by spiral bevel gears. This novel gearing arrangement would substantially lower the drive system weight partly because a face gear mesh would be used to split the input power between two output gears. However, the use of face gears and their ability to operate successfully at the speeds and loads required for an aerospace environment was unknown. Therefore a proof-of-concept phase with an existing test stand at the NASA Lewis Research Center was pursued. Hardware was designed that could be tested in Lewis' Spiral Bevel Gear Test Rig. The initial testing indicated that the face gear mesh was a feasible design that could be used at high speeds and load. Surface pitting fatigue was the typical failure mode, and that could lead to tooth fracture. An interim project was conducted to see if slight modifications to the gear tooth geometry or an alternative heat treating process could overcome the surface fatigue problems. From the initial and interim tests, it was apparent that for the surface fatigue problems to be overcome the manufacturing process used for this component would have to be developed to the level used for spiral bevel gears. The current state of the art for face gear manufacturing required using less than optimal gear materials and manufacturing techniques because the surface of the tooth form does not receive final finishing after heat treatment as it does for spiral bevel gears. This resulted in less than desirable surface hardness and manufacturing tolerances. An Advanced Research and Projects Agency (ARPA) Technology Reinvestment Project has been funded to investigate

The Sluggishness of Early-Stage Face Processing (N170 is Correlated with Negative and General Psychiatric Symptoms in Schizophrenia

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Yingjun Zheng

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Patients with schizophrenia exhibit consistent abnormalities in face-evoked N170. However, the relation between face-specific N170 abnormalities in schizophrenic patients and schizophrenia clinical characters, which probably based on common neural mechanisms, is still rarely discovered. Using event-related potentials (ERPs recording in both schizophrenic patients and healthy controls, the amplitude and latency of N170 were recorded when participants were passively watching face and non-face (table pictures. The results showed a face-specific N170 latency sluggishness in schizophrenic patients, i.e., the N170 latencies of schizophrenic patients were significantly longer than those of healthy controls under both upright face and inverted face conditions. Importantly, the face-related N170 latencies of the left temporo-occipital electrodes (P7 and PO7 were positively correlated with negative symptoms and general psychiatric symptoms. Besides the analysis of latencies, the N170 amplitudes became weaker in schizophrenic patients under both inverted face and inverted table conditions, with a left hemisphere dominant. More interestingly, the FIEs (the difference of N170 amplitudes between upright and inverted faces were absent in schizophrenic patients, which suggested the abnormality of holistic face processing. These results above revealed a marked symptom-relevant neural sluggishness of face-specific processing in schizophrenic patients, supporting the demyelinating hypothesis of schizophrenia.

Internal representations for face detection: an application of noise-based image classification to BOLD responses.

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Nestor, Adrian; Vettel, Jean M; Tarr, Michael J

2013-11-01

What basic visual structures underlie human face detection and how can we extract such structures directly from the amplitude of neural responses elicited by face processing? Here, we address these issues by investigating an extension of noise-based image classification to BOLD responses recorded in high-level visual areas. First, we assess the applicability of this classification method to such data and, second, we explore its results in connection with the neural processing of faces. To this end, we construct luminance templates from white noise fields based on the response of face-selective areas in the human ventral cortex. Using behaviorally and neurally-derived classification images, our results reveal a family of simple but robust image structures subserving face representation and detection. Thus, we confirm the role played by classical face selective regions in face detection and we help clarify the representational basis of this perceptual function. From a theory standpoint, our findings support the idea of simple but highly diagnostic neurally-coded features for face detection. At the same time, from a methodological perspective, our work demonstrates the ability of noise-based image classification in conjunction with fMRI to help uncover the structure of high-level perceptual representations. Copyright © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Effects of Face-to-Face and Computer-Mediated Constructive Controversy on Social Interdependence, Motivation, and Achievement

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Roseth, Cary J.; Saltarelli, Andy J.; Glass, Chris R.

2011-01-01

Cooperative learning capitalizes on the relational processes by which peers promote learning, yet it remains unclear whether these processes operate similarly in face-to-face and online settings. This study addresses this issue by comparing face-to-face and computer-mediated versions of "constructive controversy", a cooperative learning procedure…

Use of social media to encourage face to face communication

OpenAIRE

Čufer, Matija; Knežević, Anja

2017-01-01

Face-to-face communication is of key importance for successful socialization of a person into a society. Social media makes a good complement to such form of communication. Parents and pedagogical workers must be aware of children not replacing face-to-face communication for communication through the social media in the process of education and growing up. Young people nevertheless frequently communicate through the social media. For this reason, we tried to extract positive features of those...

Altered Functional Subnetwork During Emotional Face Processing: A Potential Intermediate Phenotype for Schizophrenia.

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Cao, Hengyi; Bertolino, Alessandro; Walter, Henrik; Schneider, Michael; Schäfer, Axel; Taurisano, Paolo; Blasi, Giuseppe; Haddad, Leila; Grimm, Oliver; Otto, Kristina; Dixson, Luanna; Erk, Susanne; Mohnke, Sebastian; Heinz, Andreas; Romanczuk-Seiferth, Nina; Mühleisen, Thomas W; Mattheisen, Manuel; Witt, Stephanie H; Cichon, Sven; Noethen, Markus; Rietschel, Marcella; Tost, Heike; Meyer-Lindenberg, Andreas

2016-06-01

Although deficits in emotional processing are prominent in schizophrenia, it has been difficult to identify neural mechanisms related to the genetic risk for this highly heritable illness. Prior studies have not found consistent regional activation or connectivity alterations in first-degree relatives compared with healthy controls, suggesting that a more comprehensive search for connectomic biomarkers is warranted. To identify a potential systems-level intermediate phenotype linked to emotion processing in schizophrenia and to examine the psychological association, task specificity, test-retest reliability, and clinical validity of the identified phenotype. The study was performed in university research hospitals from June 1, 2008, through December 31, 2013. We examined 58 unaffected first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia and 94 healthy controls with an emotional face-matching functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm. Test-retest reliability was analyzed with an independent sample of 26 healthy participants. A clinical association study was performed in 31 patients with schizophrenia and 45 healthy controls. Data analysis was performed from January 1 to September 30, 2014. Conventional amygdala activity and seeded connectivity measures, graph-based global and local network connectivity measures, Spearman rank correlation, intraclass correlation, and gray matter volumes. Among the 152 volunteers included in the relative-control sample, 58 were unaffected first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia (mean [SD] age, 33.29 [12.56]; 38 were women), and 94 were healthy controls without a first-degree relative with mental illness (mean [SD] age, 32.69 [10.09] years; 55 were women). A graph-theoretical connectivity approach identified significantly decreased connectivity in a subnetwork that primarily included the limbic cortex, visual cortex, and subcortex during emotional face processing (cluster-level P corrected for familywise error =�

Neural correlates of face processing in etiologically-distinct 12-month-old infants at high-risk of autism spectrum disorder

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Maggie W. Guy

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Neural correlates of face processing were examined in 12-month-olds at high-risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD, including 21 siblings of children with ASD (ASIBs and 15 infants with fragile X syndrome (FXS, as well as 21 low-risk (LR controls. Event-related potentials were recorded to familiar and novel face and toy stimuli. All infants demonstrated greater N290 amplitude to faces than toys. At the Nc component, LR infants showed greater amplitude to novel stimuli than to their mother’s face and own toy, whereas infants with FXS showed the opposite pattern of responses and ASIBs did not differentiate based on familiarity. These results reflect developing face specialization across high- and low-risk infants and reveal neural patterns that distinguish between groups at high-risk for ASD. Keywords: Event-related potentials, Infancy, Face processing, Autism spectrum disorders

Cortical deficits of emotional face processing in adults with ADHD: its relation to social cognition and executive function.

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Ibáñez, Agustin; Petroni, Agustin; Urquina, Hugo; Torrente, Fernando; Torralva, Teresa; Hurtado, Esteban; Guex, Raphael; Blenkmann, Alejandro; Beltrachini, Leandro; Muravchik, Carlos; Baez, Sandra; Cetkovich, Marcelo; Sigman, Mariano; Lischinsky, Alicia; Manes, Facundo

2011-01-01

Although it has been shown that adults with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have impaired social cognition, no previous study has reported the brain correlates of face valence processing. This study looked for behavioral, neuropsychological, and electrophysiological markers of emotion processing for faces (N170) in adult ADHD compared to controls matched by age, gender, educational level, and handedness. We designed an event-related potential (ERP) study based on a dual valence task (DVT), in which faces and words were presented to test the effects of stimulus type (faces, words, or face-word stimuli) and valence (positive versus negative). Individual signatures of cognitive functioning in participants with ADHD and controls were assessed with a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation, including executive functioning (EF) and theory of mind (ToM). Compared to controls, the adult ADHD group showed deficits in N170 emotion modulation for facial stimuli. These N170 impairments were observed in the absence of any deficit in facial structural processing, suggesting a specific ADHD impairment in early facial emotion modulation. The cortical current density mapping of N170 yielded a main neural source of N170 at posterior section of fusiform gyrus (maximum at left hemisphere for words and right hemisphere for faces and simultaneous stimuli). Neural generators of N170 (fusiform gyrus) were reduced in ADHD. In those patients, N170 emotion processing was associated with performance on an emotional inference ToM task, and N170 from simultaneous stimuli was associated with EF, especially working memory. This is the first report to reveal an adult ADHD-specific impairment in the cortical modulation of emotion for faces and an association between N170 cortical measures and ToM and EF.

Non-egalitarian allocations among preschool peers in a face-to-face bargaining task.

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Alicia P Melis

Full Text Available In face-to-face bargaining tasks human adults almost always agree on an equal split of resources. This is due to mutually recognized fairness and equality norms. Early developmental studies on sharing and equality norms found that egalitarian allocations of resources are not common before children are 5 or 6 years old. However, recent studies have shown that in some face-to face collaborative situations, or when recipients express their desires, children at much younger ages choose equal allocations. We investigated the ability of 3.5 and 5-year-olds to negotiate face-to-face, whether to collaborate to obtain an equal or an unequal distribution of rewards. We hypothesized that the face-to-face interaction and interdependency between partners would facilitate egalitarian outcomes at both ages. In the first experiment we found that 5-year-olds were more egalitarian than 3.5-year-olds, but neither of the age classes shared equally. In the second experiment, in which we increased the magnitude of the inequality, we found that children at both ages mostly agreed on the unequal distribution. These results show that communication and face-to-face interactions are not sufficient to guarantee equal allocations at 3-5 years of age. These results add to previous findings suggesting that in the context of non-collaboratively produced resources it is only after 5 years of age that children use equality norms to allocate resources.

Newborns' Face Recognition: Role of Inner and Outer Facial Features

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Turati, Chiara; Macchi Cassia, Viola; Simion, Francesca; Leo, Irene

2006-01-01

Existing data indicate that newborns are able to recognize individual faces, but little is known about what perceptual cues drive this ability. The current study showed that either the inner or outer features of the face can act as sufficient cues for newborns' face recognition (Experiment 1), but the outer part of the face enjoys an advantage…

Crossing the “Uncanny Valley”: adaptation to cartoon faces can influence perception of human faces

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Chen, Haiwen; Russell, Richard; Nakayama, Ken; Livingstone, Margaret

2013-01-01

Adaptation can shift what individuals identify to be a prototypical or attractive face. Past work suggests that low-level shape adaptation can affect high-level face processing but is position dependent. Adaptation to distorted images of faces can also affect face processing but only within sub-categories of faces, such as gender, age, and race/ethnicity. This study assesses whether there is a representation of face that is specific to faces (as opposed to all shapes) but general to all kinds of faces (as opposed to subcategories) by testing whether adaptation to one type of face can affect perception of another. Participants were shown cartoon videos containing faces with abnormally large eyes. Using animated videos allowed us to simulate naturalistic exposure and avoid positional shape adaptation. Results suggest that adaptation to cartoon faces with large eyes shifts preferences for human faces toward larger eyes, supporting the existence of general face representations. PMID:20465173

Task demands modulate decision and eye movement responses in the chimeric face test: examining the right hemisphere processing account

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Jason eCoronel

2014-03-01

Full Text Available A large and growing body of work, conducted in both brain-intact and brain-damaged populations, has used the free viewing chimeric face test as a measure of hemispheric dominance for the extraction of emotional information from faces. These studies generally show that normal right-handed individuals tend to perceive chimeric faces as more emotional if the emotional expression is presented on the half of the face to the viewer’s left (left hemiface. However, the mechanisms underlying this lateralized bias remain unclear. Here, we examine the extent to which this bias is driven by right hemisphere processing advantages versus default scanning biases in a unique way -- by changing task demands. In particular, we compare the original task with one in which right-hemisphere-biased processing cannot provide a decision advantage. Our behavioral and eye-movement data are inconsistent with the predictions of a default scanning bias account and support the idea that the left hemiface bias found in the chimeric face test is largely due to strategic use of right hemisphere processing mechanisms.

When does subliminal affective image priming influence the ability of schizophrenic patients to perceive face emotions?

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Vaina, Lucia Maria; Rana, Kunjan D; Cotos, Ionela; Li-Yang, Chen; Huang, Melissa A; Podea, Delia

2014-12-24

Deficits in face emotion perception are among the most pervasive aspects of schizophrenia impairments which strongly affects interpersonal communication and social skills. Schizophrenic patients (PSZ) and healthy control subjects (HCS) performed 2 psychophysical tasks. One, the SAFFIMAP test, was designed to determine the impact of subliminally presented affective or neutral images on the accuracy of face-expression (angry or neutral) perception. In the second test, FEP, subjects saw pictures of face-expression and were asked to rate them as angry, happy, or neutral. The following clinical scales were used to determine the acute symptoms in PSZ: Positive and Negative Syndrome (PANSS), Young Mania Rating (YMRS), Hamilton Depression (HAM-D), and Hamilton Anxiety (HAM-A). On the SAFFIMAP test, different from the HCS group, the PSZ group tended to categorize the neutral expression of test faces as angry and their response to the test-face expression was not influenced by the affective content of the primes. In PSZ, the PANSS-positive score was significantly correlated with correct perception of angry faces for aggressive or pleasant primes. YMRS scores were strongly correlated with PSZ's tendency to recognize angry face expressions when the prime was a pleasant or a neutral image. The HAM-D score was positively correlated with categorizing the test-faces as neutral, regardless of the affective content of the prime or of the test-face expression (angry or neutral). Despite its exploratory nature, this study provides the first evidence that conscious perception and categorization of facial emotions (neutral or angry) in PSZ is directly affected by their positive or negative symptoms of the disease as defined by their individual scores on the clinical diagnostic scales.

Core corporate governance dilemmas facing boards: a South African perspective

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Hyram Serretta

2011-08-01

Full Text Available Directors and boards face many challenges in terms of managing complexity. A key factor of success in practicing good corporate governance is the board’s ability to cope with paradox. The purpose of this research has been to explore the core corporate governance dilemmas facing boards. The investigation was qualitative in nature using the Delphi technique. Six core corporate governance dilemmas facing board members were identified one of which is not mentioned in the international literature. The findings should provide directors with an ability to identify the nature of the paradoxes they need to respond to.

Oxytocin and social pretreatment have similar effects on processing of negative emotional faces in healthy adult males

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Anna eKis

2013-08-01

Full Text Available Oxytocin has been shown to affect several aspects of human social cognition, including facial emotion processing. There is also evidence that social stimuli (such as eye-contact can effectively modulate endogenous oxytocin levels.In the present study we directly tested whether intranasal oxytocin administration and pre-treatment with social stimuli had similar effects on face processing at the behavioural level. Subjects (N=52 healthy adult males were presented with a set of faces with expressions of different valence (negative, neutral, positive following different types of pretreatment (oxytocin – OT or placebo – PL and social interaction – Soc or no social interaction – NSoc, N=13 in each and were asked to rate all faces for perceived emotion and trustworthiness. On the next day subjects’ recognition memory was tested on a set of neutral faces and additionally they had to again rate each face for trustworthiness and emotion.Subjects in both the OT and the Soc pretreatment group (as compared to the PL and to the NSoc groups gave higher emotion and trustworthiness scores for faces with negative emotional expression. Moreover, 24 h later, subjects in the OT and Soc groups (unlike in control groups gave lower trustworthiness scores for previously negative faces, than for faces previously seen as emotionally neutral or positive.In sum these results provide the first direct evidence of the similar effects of intranasal oxytocin administration and social stimulation on the perception of negative facial emotions as well as on the delayed recall of negative emotional information.

Visual search of Mooney faces

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Jessica Emeline Goold

2016-02-01

Full Text Available Faces spontaneously capture attention. However, which special attributes of a face underlie this effect are unclear. To address this question, we investigate how gist information, specific visual properties and differing amounts of experience with faces affect the time required to detect a face. Three visual search experiments were conducted investigating the rapidness of human observers to detect Mooney face images. Mooney images are two-toned, ambiguous images. They were used in order to have stimuli that maintain gist information but limit low-level image properties. Results from the experiments show: 1 although upright Mooney faces were searched inefficiently, they were detected more rapidly than inverted Mooney face targets, demonstrating the important role of gist information in guiding attention towards a face. 2 Several specific Mooney face identities were searched efficiently while others were not, suggesting the involvement of specific visual properties in face detection. 3 By providing participants with unambiguous gray-scale versions of the Mooney face targets prior to the visual search task, the targets were detected significantly more efficiently, suggesting that prior experience with Mooney faces improves the ability to extract gist information for rapid face detection. However, a week of training with Mooney face categorization did not lead to even more efficient visual search of Mooney face targets. In summary, these results reveal that specific local image properties cannot account for how faces capture attention. On the other hand, gist information alone cannot account for how faces capture attention either. Prior experience facilitates the effect of gist on visual search of faces, making faces a special object category for guiding attention.

Tolerance to spatial-relational transformations in unfamiliar faces: A further challenge to a configural processing account of identity recognition.

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Lorenzino, Martina; Caminati, Martina; Caudek, Corrado

2018-05-25

One of the most important questions in face perception research is to understand what information is extracted from a face in order to recognize its identity. Recognition of facial identity has been attributed to a special sensitivity to "configural" information. However, recent studies have challenged the configural account by showing that participants are poor in discriminating variations of metric distances among facial features, especially for familiar as opposed to unfamiliar faces, whereas a configural account predicts the opposite. We aimed to extend these previous results by examining classes of unfamiliar faces with which we have different levels of expertise. We hypothesized an inverse relation between sensitivity to configural information and expertise with a given class of faces, but only for neutral expressions. By first matching perceptual discriminability, we measured tolerance to subtle configural transformations with same-race (SR) versus other-race (OR) faces, and with upright versus upside-down faces. Consistently with our predictions, we found a lower sensitivity to at-threshold configural changes for SR compared to OR faces. We also found that, for our stimuli, the face inversion effect disappeared for neutral but not for emotional faces - a result that can also be attributed to a lower sensitivity to configural transformations for faces presented in a more familiar orientation. The present findings question a purely configural account of face processing and suggest that the role of spatial-relational information in face processing varies according to the functional demands of the task and to the characteristics of the stimuli. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Learning discriminant face descriptor.

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Lei, Zhen; Pietikäinen, Matti; Li, Stan Z

2014-02-01

Local feature descriptor is an important module for face recognition and those like Gabor and local binary patterns (LBP) have proven effective face descriptors. Traditionally, the form of such local descriptors is predefined in a handcrafted way. In this paper, we propose a method to learn a discriminant face descriptor (DFD) in a data-driven way. The idea is to learn the most discriminant local features that minimize the difference of the features between images of the same person and maximize that between images from different people. In particular, we propose to enhance the discriminative ability of face representation in three aspects. First, the discriminant image filters are learned. Second, the optimal neighborhood sampling strategy is soft determined. Third, the dominant patterns are statistically constructed. Discriminative learning is incorporated to extract effective and robust features. We further apply the proposed method to the heterogeneous (cross-modality) face recognition problem and learn DFD in a coupled way (coupled DFD or C-DFD) to reduce the gap between features of heterogeneous face images to improve the performance of this challenging problem. Extensive experiments on FERET, CAS-PEAL-R1, LFW, and HFB face databases validate the effectiveness of the proposed DFD learning on both homogeneous and heterogeneous face recognition problems. The DFD improves POEM and LQP by about 4.5 percent on LFW database and the C-DFD enhances the heterogeneous face recognition performance of LBP by over 25 percent.

Amygdala, Pulvinar & Inferior Parietal Cortex Contribute to Early Processing of Faces without Awareness

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Vanessa eTroiani

2013-06-01

Full Text Available The goals of the present study were twofold. First, we wished to investigate the neural correlates of stimulus-driven processing of stimuli strongly suppressed from awareness and in the absence of top-down influences. We accomplished this using a novel approach in which participants performed an orthogonal task atop a flash suppression noise image to prevent top-down search. Second, we wished to investigate the extent to which amygdala responses differentiate between suppressed stimuli (fearful faces and houses based on their motivational relevance. Using continuous flash suppression in conjunction with fMRI, we presented fearful faces, houses, and a no stimulus control to one eye while participants performed an orthogonal task that appeared atop the flashing Mondrian image presented to the opposite eye. In 29 adolescents, we show activation in subcortical regions, including the superior colliculus, amygdala, thalamus, and hippocampus for suppressed objects (fearful faces and houses compared to a no stimulus control. Suppressed stimuli showed less activation compared to a no stimulus control in early visual cortex, indicating that object information was being suppressed from this region. Additionally, we find no activation in regions associated with conscious processing of these percepts (fusiform gyrus and/or parahippocampal cortex as assessed by mean activations and multi-voxel patterns. A psychophysiological interaction analysis that seeded the amygdala showed task-specific (fearful faces greater than houses modulation of right pulvinar and left inferior parietal cortex. Taken together, our results support a role for the amygdala in stimulus-driven attentional guidance towards objects of relevance and a potential mechanism for successful suppression of rivalrous stimuli.

Justification of process of loading coal onto face conveyors by auger heads of shearer-loader machines

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Nguyen, K. L.; Gabov, V. V.; Zadkov, D. A.; Le, T. B.

2018-03-01

This paper analyzes the processes of removing coal from the area of its dislodging and loading the disintegrated mass onto face conveyors by auger heads of shearer-loader machines. The loading process is assumed to consist of four subprocesses: dislodging coal, removal of the disintegrated mass by auger blades from the crushing area, passive transportation of the disintegrated mass, and forming the load flow on the bearing surface of a face conveyor. Each of the considered subprocesses is different in its physical nature, the number of factors influencing it, and can be complex or multifactor. Possibilities of improving the efficiency of loading coal onto a face conveyor are addressed. The selected criteria of loading efficiency are load rate, specific energy consumption, and coal size reduction. Efficiency is improved by reducing the resistance to movement of the disintegrated mass during loading by increasing the area of the loading window section and the volume of the loading area on the conveyor, as well as by coordination of intensity of flows related to the considered processes in local areas.

Face pareidolia in the rhesus monkey

OpenAIRE

Taubert, Jessica; Wardle, Susan G.; Flessert, Molly; Leopold, David A.; Ungerleider, Leslie G.

2017-01-01

Face perception in humans and non-human primates is rapid and accurate[1–4]. In the human brain, a network of visual processing regions is specialized for faces[5–7]. Although face processing is a priority of the primate visual system, face detection is not infallible. Face pareidolia is the compelling illusion of perceiving facial features on inanimate objects, such as the illusory face on the surface of the moon. Although face pareidolia is commonly experienced by humans, its presence in ot...

A causal relationship between face-patch activity and face-detection behavior.

Science.gov (United States)

Sadagopan, Srivatsun; Zarco, Wilbert; Freiwald, Winrich A

2017-04-04

The primate brain contains distinct areas densely populated by face-selective neurons. One of these, face-patch ML, contains neurons selective for contrast relationships between face parts. Such contrast-relationships can serve as powerful heuristics for face detection. However, it is unknown whether neurons with such selectivity actually support face-detection behavior. Here, we devised a naturalistic face-detection task and combined it with fMRI-guided pharmacological inactivation of ML to test whether ML is of critical importance for real-world face detection. We found that inactivation of ML impairs face detection. The effect was anatomically specific, as inactivation of areas outside ML did not affect face detection, and it was categorically specific, as inactivation of ML impaired face detection while sparing body and object detection. These results establish that ML function is crucial for detection of faces in natural scenes, performing a critical first step on which other face processing operations can build.

Visual attention to emotional face in schizophrenia: an eye tracking study.

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Mania Asgharpour

2015-03-01

Full Text Available Deficits in the processing of facial emotions have been reported extensively in patients with schizophrenia. To explore whether restricted attention is the cause of impaired emotion processing in these patients, we examined visual attention through tracking eye movements in response to emotional and neutral face stimuli in a group of patients with schizophrenia and healthy individuals. We also examined the correlation between visual attention allocation and symptoms severity in our patient group.Thirty adult patients with schizophrenia and 30 matched healthy controls participated in this study. Visual attention data were recorded while participants passively viewed emotional-neutral face pairs for 500 ms. The relationship between the visual attention and symptoms severity were assessed by the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS in the schizophrenia group. Repeated Measures ANOVAs were used to compare the groups.Comparing the number of fixations made during face-pairs presentation, we found that patients with schizophrenia made fewer fixations on faces, regardless of the expression of the face. Analysis of the number of fixations on negative-neutral pairs also revealed that the patients made fewer fixations on both neutral and negative faces. Analysis of number of fixations on positive-neutral pairs only showed more fixations on positive relative to neutral expressions in both groups. We found no correlations between visual attention pattern to faces and symptom severity in schizophrenic patients.The results of this study suggest that the facial recognition deficit in schizophrenia is related to decreased attention to face stimuli. Finding of no difference in visual attention for positive-neutral face pairs between the groups is in line with studies that have shown increased ability to positive emotional perception in these patients.

Adjudicating between face-coding models with individual-face fMRI responses.

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Johan D Carlin

2017-07-01

Full Text Available The perceptual representation of individual faces is often explained with reference to a norm-based face space. In such spaces, individuals are encoded as vectors where identity is primarily conveyed by direction and distinctiveness by eccentricity. Here we measured human fMRI responses and psychophysical similarity judgments of individual face exemplars, which were generated as realistic 3D animations using a computer-graphics model. We developed and evaluated multiple neurobiologically plausible computational models, each of which predicts a representational distance matrix and a regional-mean activation profile for 24 face stimuli. In the fusiform face area, a face-space coding model with sigmoidal ramp tuning provided a better account of the data than one based on exemplar tuning. However, an image-processing model with weighted banks of Gabor filters performed similarly. Accounting for the data required the inclusion of a measurement-level population averaging mechanism that approximates how fMRI voxels locally average distinct neuronal tunings. Our study demonstrates the importance of comparing multiple models and of modeling the measurement process in computational neuroimaging.

Consciousness and arousal effects on emotional face processing as revealed by brain oscillations. A gamma band analysis.

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Balconi, Michela; Lucchiari, Claudio

2008-01-01

It remains an open question whether it is possible to assign a single brain operation or psychological function for facial emotion decoding to a certain type of oscillatory activity. Gamma band activity (GBA) offers an adequate tool for studying cortical activation patterns during emotional face information processing. In the present study brain oscillations were analyzed in response to facial expression of emotions. Specifically, GBA modulation was measured when twenty subjects looked at emotional (angry, fearful, happy, and sad faces) or neutral faces in two different conditions: supraliminal (10 ms) vs subliminal (150 ms) stimulation (100 target-mask pairs for each condition). The results showed that both consciousness and significance of the stimulus in terms of arousal can modulate the power synchronization (ERD decrease) during 150-350 time range: an early oscillatory event showed its peak at about 200 ms post-stimulus. GBA was enhanced by supraliminal more than subliminal elaboration, as well as more by high arousal (anger and fear) than low arousal (happiness and sadness) emotions. Finally a left-posterior dominance for conscious elaboration was found, whereas right hemisphere was discriminant in emotional processing of face in comparison with neutral face.

Musical ability and non-native speech-sound processing are linked through sensitivity to pitch and spectral information.

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Kempe, Vera; Bublitz, Dennis; Brooks, Patricia J

2015-05-01

Is the observed link between musical ability and non-native speech-sound processing due to enhanced sensitivity to acoustic features underlying both musical and linguistic processing? To address this question, native English speakers (N = 118) discriminated Norwegian tonal contrasts and Norwegian vowels. Short tones differing in temporal, pitch, and spectral characteristics were used to measure sensitivity to the various acoustic features implicated in musical and speech processing. Musical ability was measured using Gordon's Advanced Measures of Musical Audiation. Results showed that sensitivity to specific acoustic features played a role in non-native speech-sound processing: Controlling for non-verbal intelligence, prior foreign language-learning experience, and sex, sensitivity to pitch and spectral information partially mediated the link between musical ability and discrimination of non-native vowels and lexical tones. The findings suggest that while sensitivity to certain acoustic features partially mediates the relationship between musical ability and non-native speech-sound processing, complex tests of musical ability also tap into other shared mechanisms. © 2014 The British Psychological Society.

Looking Like a Leader–Facial Shape Predicts Perceived Height and Leadership Ability

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Re, Daniel E.; Hunter, David W.; Coetzee, Vinet; Tiddeman, Bernard P.; Xiao, Dengke; DeBruine, Lisa M.; Jones, Benedict C.; Perrett, David I.

2013-01-01

Judgments of leadership ability from face images predict the outcomes of actual political elections and are correlated with leadership success in the corporate world. The specific facial cues that people use to judge leadership remain unclear, however. Physical height is also associated with political and organizational success, raising the possibility that facial cues of height contribute to leadership perceptions. Consequently, we assessed whether cues to height exist in the face and, if so, whether they are associated with perception of leadership ability. We found that facial cues to perceived height had a strong relationship with perceived leadership ability. Furthermore, when allowed to manually manipulate faces, participants increased facial cues associated with perceived height in order to maximize leadership perception. A morphometric analysis of face shape revealed that structural facial masculinity was not responsible for the relationship between perceived height and perceived leadership ability. Given the prominence of facial appearance in making social judgments, facial cues to perceived height may have a significant influence on leadership selection. PMID:24324651

Children’s empathy in context: Individual abilities embedded in social processes

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Roerig, S.; van Wesel, F.; Evers, S.J.T.M.; Krabbendam, L.

2015-01-01

In neuropsychological and neuro-scientific research, empathy is often approached as an individual ability, whereas researchers in the field of anthropology focus on empathy as a dialectic process between two (or more) people. In our study we work as an interdisciplinary research team combining and

THE ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ CREATIVE THINKING ABILITY USING MIND MAP IN BIOTECHNOLOGY COURSE

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

B. Fatmawati

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Process of learning which generally practiced nowadays is mostly in the form of face-to-face (lecturing and one way communication. Sometimes the students are given tasks to fulfill the material target in one semester such as papers, internet-based summary, and/or other articles. Such things cause learners accustomed to convergent thinking and not to divergent thinking. Mind map is one of creative products which conducted by learners in learning process. Learning with mind map focuses more on the activeness and creative activity of the students. It will improve their ability to memorize and strengthen concept understanding of the student, and improve their creative thinking ability. This research was focused to analysis the creative thinking skills students using mind mapping in biotechnology course. The participant was students of Biology Education (N=55 consisting of two team that was team A (N=25 and team B (N=30. The result showed gain value of each team of creative thinking skills which were: team A (0.62 with three category: low (8%, average (40%, and high (52%. Team B (0,04 with three category: low (80%, average (10% and high (10%.

The Relation of Age and Reading Ability to Memory Processing.

Science.gov (United States)

Marrach, Alexa; Fireman, Gary

This study examined the relation of reading ability, age, and familiarity to iconic and short-term memory processing and how the familiarity of the stimuli affects recall. A total of 10 children in grades 2 through 6 and 10 adults were shown novel abstract forms, words, and non-words varying in order of approximation to English, for 50 msec., 500…

Validity, Sensitivity, and Responsiveness of the 11-Face Faces Pain Scale to Postoperative Pain in Adult Orthopedic Surgery Patients.

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Van Giang, Nguyen; Chiu, Hsiao-Yean; Thai, Duong Hong; Kuo, Shu-Yu; Tsai, Pei-Shan

2015-10-01

Pain is common in patients after orthopedic surgery. The 11-face Faces Pain Scale has not been validated for use in adult patients with postoperative pain. To assess the validity of the 11-face Faces Pain Scale and its ability to detect responses to pain medications, and to determine whether the sensitivity of the 11-face Faces Pain Scale for detecting changes in pain intensity over time is associated with gender differences in adult postorthopedic surgery patients. The 11-face Faces Pain Scale was translated into Vietnamese using forward and back translation. Postoperative pain was assessed using an 11-point numerical rating scale and the 11-face Faces Pain Scale on the day of surgery, and before (Time 1) and every 30 minutes after (Times 2-5) the patients had taken pain medications on the first postoperative day. The 11-face Faces Pain Scale highly correlated with the numerical rating scale (r = 0.78, p Scale is appropriate for measuring acute postoperative pain in adults. Copyright © 2015 American Society for Pain Management Nursing. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

[Treatment goals in FACE philosophy].

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Martin, Domingo; Maté, Amaia; Zabalegui, Paula; Valenzuela, Jaime

2017-03-01

The FACE philosophy is characterized by clearly defined treatment goals: facial esthetics, dental esthetics, periodontal health, functional occlusion, neuromuscular mechanism and joint function. The purpose is to establish ideal occlusion with good facial esthetics and an orthopedic stable joint position. The authors present all the concepts of FACE philosophy and illustrate them through one case report. Taking into account all the FACE philosophy concepts increases diagnostic ability and improves the quality and stability of treatment outcomes. The goal of this philosophy is to harmonize the facial profile, tooth alignment, periodontium, functional occlusion, neuromuscular mechanism and joint function. The evaluation and treatment approach to vertical problems are unique to the philosophy. © EDP Sciences, SFODF, 2017.

A new method for face detection in colour images for emotional bio-robots

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

HAPESHI; Kevin

2010-01-01

Emotional bio-robots have become a hot research topic in last two decades. Though there have been some progress in research, design and development of various emotional bio-robots, few of them can be used in practical applications. The study of emotional bio-robots demands multi-disciplinary co-operation. It involves computer science, artificial intelligence, 3D computation, engineering system modelling, analysis and simulation, bionics engineering, automatic control, image processing and pattern recognition etc. Among them, face detection belongs to image processing and pattern recognition. An emotional robot must have the ability to recognize various objects, particularly, it is very important for a bio-robot to be able to recognize human faces from an image. In this paper, a face detection method is proposed for identifying any human faces in colour images using human skin model and eye detection method. Firstly, this method can be used to detect skin regions from the input colour image after normalizing its luminance. Then, all face candidates are identified using an eye detection method. Comparing with existing algorithms, this method only relies on the colour and geometrical data of human face rather than using training datasets. From experimental results, it is shown that this method is effective and fast and it can be applied to the development of an emotional bio-robot with further improvements of its speed and accuracy.

Autistic traits are linked to reduced adaptive coding of face identity and selectively poorer face recognition in men but not women.

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Rhodes, Gillian; Jeffery, Linda; Taylor, Libby; Ewing, Louise

2013-11-01

Our ability to discriminate and recognize thousands of faces despite their similarity as visual patterns relies on adaptive, norm-based, coding mechanisms that are continuously updated by experience. Reduced adaptive coding of face identity has been proposed as a neurocognitive endophenotype for autism, because it is found in autism and in relatives of individuals with autism. Autistic traits can also extend continuously into the general population, raising the possibility that reduced adaptive coding of face identity may be more generally associated with autistic traits. In the present study, we investigated whether adaptive coding of face identity decreases as autistic traits increase in an undergraduate population. Adaptive coding was measured using face identity aftereffects, and autistic traits were measured using the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ) and its subscales. We also measured face and car recognition ability to determine whether autistic traits are selectively related to face recognition difficulties. We found that men who scored higher on levels of autistic traits related to social interaction had reduced adaptive coding of face identity. This result is consistent with the idea that atypical adaptive face-coding mechanisms are an endophenotype for autism. Autistic traits were also linked with face-selective recognition difficulties in men. However, there were some unexpected sex differences. In women, autistic traits were linked positively, rather than negatively, with adaptive coding of identity, and were unrelated to face-selective recognition difficulties. These sex differences indicate that autistic traits can have different neurocognitive correlates in men and women and raise the intriguing possibility that endophenotypes of autism can differ in males and females. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Exposure to the self-face facilitates identification of dynamic facial expressions: influences on individual differences.

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Li, Yuan Hang; Tottenham, Nim

2013-04-01

A growing literature suggests that the self-face is involved in processing the facial expressions of others. The authors experimentally activated self-face representations to assess its effects on the recognition of dynamically emerging facial expressions of others. They exposed participants to videos of either their own faces (self-face prime) or faces of others (nonself-face prime) prior to a facial expression judgment task. Their results show that experimentally activating self-face representations results in earlier recognition of dynamically emerging facial expression. As a group, participants in the self-face prime condition recognized expressions earlier (when less affective perceptual information was available) compared to participants in the nonself-face prime condition. There were individual differences in performance, such that poorer expression identification was associated with higher autism traits (in this neurocognitively healthy sample). However, when randomized into the self-face prime condition, participants with high autism traits performed as well as those with low autism traits. Taken together, these data suggest that the ability to recognize facial expressions in others is linked with the internal representations of our own faces. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.