Recognition of Face Identity and Emotion in Expressive Specific Language Impairment

Objective: To study face and emotion recognition in children with mostly expressive specific language impairment (SLI-E). Subjects and Methods: A test movie to study perception and recognition of faces and mimic-gestural expression was applied to 24 children diagnosed as suffering from SLI-E and an age-matched control group of normally developing children. Results: Compared to a normal control group, the SLI-E children scored significantly worse in both the face and expression recognition tasks with a preponderant effect on emotion recognition. The performance of the SLI-E group could not be explained by reduced attention during the test session. Conclusion: We conclude that SLI-E is associated with a deficiency in decoding non-verbal emotional facial and gestural information, which might lead to profound and persistent problems in social interaction and development. Copyright (C) 2012 S. Karger AG, Base

Perception, Action, and Roelofs Effect: A Mere Illusion of Dissociation

A prominent and influential hypothesis of vision suggests the existence of two separate visual systems within the brain, one creating our perception of the world and another guiding our actions within it. The induced Roelofs effect has been described as providing strong evidence for this perception/action dissociation: When a small visual target is surrounded by a large frame positioned so that the frame's center is offset from the observer's midline, the perceived location of the target is shifted in the direction opposite the frame's offset. In spite of this perceptual mislocalization, however, the observer can accurately guide movements to the target location. Thus, perception is prone to the illusion while actions seem immune. Here we demonstrate that the Roelofs illusion is caused by a frame-induced transient distortion of the observer's apparent midline. We further demonstrate that actions guided to targets within this same distorted egocentric reference frame are fully expected to be accurate, since the errors of target localization will exactly cancel the errors of motor guidance. These findings provide a mechanistic explanation for the various perceptual and motor effects of the induced Roelofs illusion without requiring the existence of separate neural systems for perception and action. Given this, the behavioral dissociation that accompanies the Roelofs effect cannot be considered evidence of a dissociation of perception and action. This indicates a general need to re-evaluate the broad class of evidence purported to support this hypothesized dissociation

Social perception and aging: The relationship between aging and the perception of subtle changes in facial happiness and identity

Previous findings suggest that older adults show impairments in the social perception of faces, including the perception of emotion and facial identity. The majority of this work has tended to examine performance on tasks involving young adult faces and prototypical emotions. While useful, this can influence performance differences between groups due to perceptual biases and limitations on task performance. Here we sought to examine how typical aging is associated with the perception of subtle changes in facial happiness and facial identity in older adult faces. We developed novel tasks that permitted the ability to assess facial happiness, facial identity, and non-social perception (object perception) across similar task parameters. We observe that aging is linked with declines in the ability to make fine-grained judgements in the perception of facial happiness and facial identity (from older adult faces), but not for non-social (object) perception. This pattern of results is discussed in relation to mechanisms that may contribute to declines in facial perceptual processing in older adulthood