Social re-orientation and brain development: An expanded and updated view.

Social development has been the focus of a great deal of neuroscience based research over the past decade. In this review, we focus on providing a framework for understanding how changes in facets of social development may correspond with changes in brain function. We argue that (1) distinct phases of social behavior emerge based on whether the organizing social force is the mother, peer play, peer integration, or romantic intimacy; (2) each phase is marked by a high degree of affect-driven motivation that elicits a distinct response in subcortical structures; (3) activity generated by these structures interacts with circuits in prefrontal cortex that guide executive functions, and occipital and temporal lobe circuits, which generate specific sensory and perceptual social representations. We propose that the direction, magnitude and duration of interaction among these affective, executive, and perceptual systems may relate to distinct sensitive periods across development that contribute to establishing long-term patterns of brain function and behavior

Shared or Separate Mechanisms for Self-Face and Other-Face Processing? Evidence from Adaptation

Evidence that self-face recognition is dissociable from general face recognition has important implications both for models of social cognition and for our understanding of face recognition. In two studies, we examine how adaptation affects the perception of personally familiar faces, and we use a visual adaptation paradigm to investigate whether the neural mechanisms underlying the recognition of one’s own and other faces are shared or separate. In Study 1 we show that the representation of personally familiar faces is rapidly updated by visual experience with unfamiliar faces, so that the perception of one’s own face and a friend’s face is altered by a brief period of adaptation to distorted unfamiliar faces. In Study 2, participants adapted to images of their own and a friend’s face distorted in opposite directions; the contingent aftereffects we observe are indicative of separate neural populations, but we suggest that these reflect coding of facial identity rather than of the categories “self” and “other.

Developmental improvement and age-related decline in unfamiliar face matching

Age-related changes have been documented widely in studies of face recognition and eyewitness identification. However, it is not clear whether these changes arise from general developmental differences in memory or occur specifically during the perceptual processing of faces. We report two experiments to track such perceptual changes using a 1-in-10 (Experiment 1) and 1-in-1 (Experiment 2) matching task for unfamiliar faces. Both experiments showed improvements in face matching during childhood and adult-like accuracy levels by adolescence. In addition, face-matching performance declined in adults of the age of 65. These findings indicate that developmental improvements and aging-related differences in face processing arise from changes in the perceptual encoding of faces. A clear face inversion effect was also present in all age groups. This indicates that those age-related changes in face matching reflect a quantitative effect, whereby typical face processes are engaged but do not operate at the best-possible level. These data suggest that part of the problem of eyewitness identification in children and elderly persons might reflect impairments in the perceptual processing of unfamiliar faces

FMRI and ERP investigations of body representations in the human lateral and ventral occipitotemporal cortex

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Towards a model of human body perception

Item does not contain fulltextFrom just a glimpse of another person, we make inferences about their current states and longstanding traits. These inferences are normally spontaneous and effortless, yet they are crucial in shaping our impressions and behaviours towards other people. What are the perceptual operations involved in the rapid extraction of socially relevant information? To answer this question, over the last decade the visual and cognitive neuroscience of social stimuli has received new inputs through emerging proposals of social vision approaches. Perhaps by function of these contributions, researchers have reached a certain degree of consensus over a standard model of face perception. This thesis aims to extend social vision approaches to the case of human body perception. In doing so, it establishes the building blocks for a perceptual model of the human body which integrates the extraction of socially relevant information from the appearance of the body. Using visual tasks, the data show that perceptual representations of the human body are sensitive to socially relevant information (e.g. sex, weight, emotional expression). Specifically, in the first empirical chapter I dissect the perceptual representations of body sex. Using a visual search paradigm, I demonstrate a differential and asymmetrical representation of sex from human body shape. In the second empirical chapter, using the Garner selective attention task, I show that the dimension of body sex is independent from the information of emotional body postures. Finally, in the third empirical chapter, I provide evidence that category selective visual brain regions, including the body selective region EBA, are directly involved in forming perceptual expectations towards incoming visual stimuli. Socially relevant information of the body might shape visual representations of the body by acting as a set of expectancies available to the observer during perceptual operations. In the general discussion I address how the findings of the empirical chapters inform us about the perceptual encoding of human body shape. Further, I propose how these results provide the initial steps for a unified social vision model of human body perception. Finally, I advance the hypothesis that rapid social categorisation during perception is explained by mechanisms generally affecting the perceptual analysis of objects under naturalistic conditions (e.g. expectations-expertise) operating within the social domain.Bangor University, 17 februari 2020Promotor : Downing, P.E. Co-promotor : Koldewyn, K.182 p

Facilitated Detection of Social Cues Conveyed by Familiar Faces

Recognition of the identity of familiar faces in conditions with poor visibility or over large changes in head angle, lighting and partial occlusion is far more accurate than recognition of unfamiliar faces in similar conditions. Here we used a visual search paradigm to test if one class of social cues transmitted by faces—direction of another’s attention as conveyed by gaze direction and head orientation—is perceived more rapidly in personally familiar faces than in unfamiliar faces. We found a strong effect of familiarity on the detection of these social cues, suggesting that the times to process these signals in familiar faces are markedly faster than the corresponding processing times for unfamiliar faces. In the light of these new data, hypotheses on the organization of the visual system for processing faces are formulated and discussed

Visual adaptation and face perception

The appearance of faces can be strongly affected by the characteristics of faces viewed previously. These perceptual after-effects reflect processes of sensory adaptation that are found throughout the visual system, but which have been considered only relatively recently in the context of higher level perceptual judgements. In this review, we explore the consequences of adaptation for human face perception, and the implications of adaptation for understanding the neural-coding schemes underlying the visual representation of faces. The properties of face after-effects suggest that they, in part, reflect response changes at high and possibly face-specific levels of visual processing. Yet, the form of the after-effects and the norm-based codes that they point to show many parallels with the adaptations and functional organization that are thought to underlie the encoding of perceptual attributes like colour. The nature and basis for human colour vision have been studied extensively, and we draw on ideas and principles that have been developed to account for norms and normalization in colour vision to consider potential similarities and differences in the representation and adaptation of faces

Cross-orientation transfer of adaptation for facial identity is asymmetric: A study using contrast-based recognition thresholds

AbstractRecent studies suggest that adaptation effects for face shape and gender transfer from upright to inverted faces more than the reverse. We investigated whether a similar asymmetry occurred for face identity, using a recently developed adaptation method based on contrast-recognition thresholds. When adapting and test stimuli shared the same orientation, aftereffects were similar for upright and inverted faces. When orientation differed, there was significant transfer of aftereffects from upright adapting to inverted test faces, but none from inverted to upright faces. We show that asymmetric cross-orientation transfer of face aftereffects generalize across two distinct face adaptation paradigms: the previously used perceptual-bias methodology and the recently introduced contrast-threshold based adaptation paradigm. These results also represent a generalization from aftereffects for face shape and gender to aftereffects for face identity. While these results are consistent with the dual-mode hypothesis, they can also be accounted for by a single population of units of varying orientation selectivity