Multivoxel Patterns in Face-Sensitive Temporal Regions Reveal an Encoding Schema Based on Detecting Life in a Face

More than a decade of research has demonstrated that faces evoke prioritized processing in a ‘core face network’ of three brain regions. However, whether these regions prioritize the detection of global facial form (shared by humans and mannequins) or the detection of life in a face has remained unclear. Here, we dissociate form-based and animacy-based encoding of faces by using animate and inanimate faces with human form (humans, mannequins) and dog form (real dogs, toy dogs). We used multivariate pattern analysis of BOLD responses to uncover the representational similarity space for each area in the core face network. Here, we show that only responses in the inferior occipital gyrus are organized by global facial form alone (human vs dog) while animacy becomes an additional organizational priority in later face-processing regions: the lateral fusiform gyri (latFG) and right superior temporal sulcus. Additionally, patterns evoked by human faces were maximally distinct from all other face categories in the latFG and parts of the extended face perception system. These results suggest that once a face configuration is perceived, faces are further scrutinized for whether the face is alive and worthy of social cognitive resources

From mind perception to mental connection: Synchrony as a mechanism for social understanding

Abstract Connecting deeply with another mind is as enigmatic as it is fulfilling. Why people ''click'' with some people but not others is one of the great unsolved mysteries of science. However, researchers from psychology and neuroscience are converging on a likely physiological basis for connection -neural synchrony (entrainment). Here, we review research on the necessary precursors for interpersonal synchrony: the ability to detect a mind and resonate with its outputs. Further, We describe potential mechanisms for the development of synchrony between two minds. We then consider recent neuroimaging and behavioral evidence for the adaptive benefits of synchrony, including neural efficiency and the release of a reward signal that promotes future social interaction. In nature, neural synchrony yields behavioral synchrony. Humans use behavioral synchrony to promote neural synchrony, and thus, social bonding. This reverse-engineering of social connection is an important innovation likely underlying this distinctively human capacity to create large-scale social coordination and cohesion. At different states in our lives, the signs of love may vary: dependence, attraction, contentment, worry, loyalty, grief, but at the heart, the source is always the same. Human beings have the rare capacity to connect with each other, against all odds. Michael Dorris People seek meaning in life through the company of others. Yet, as anyone who has ever felt lonely in a crowd can attest, company alone is not enough. What people really seek is connection, the pleasurable mutual engagement between oneself and another mind. However, despite its importance, the origin of mental connection is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of science. Here we review studies from a diverse literature that, collectively, converge on an origin of mental connection. First, we review evidence that the perceptual systems in the human brain are tuned to seek other minds and predict their behavior. Second, we suggest that the ability to dynamically predict behavior affords synchrony. We highlight the importance of synchrony as an adaptive neural mechanism by which people entrain to others; an adaptation that blurs the self-other boundary and promotes social bonds through the pleasurable feeling of connection. Finally, we speculate that the human brain, in contrast to the brains of other species, is uniquely able to reverse engineer connectionby-synchrony, thereby creating mass social coordination and cohesion. How the Brain Finds a Mind As Piaget famously opined, cognitive development is about making models. As children develop, their models of the world become increasingly sophisticated via the shaping Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6/8 (2012): 589-606, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012 ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd processes of assimilation and accommodation From birth, humans are predisposed to attend to animate beings. Newborns look more at faces than any other objects The brain's Turing Tests Alan Turing, a mathematician and computer scientist, famously outlined a scenario that would define whether a computer could be said to ''think.'' In this scenario, a person asks a series of spontaneous questions, and a second person or a computer responds to these questions via text. A computer passes the ''Turing Test'' if a human judge confuses its text responses with that of a real person. Today, computer programs can pass the Turing Test, albeit briefly. Indeed, Artificial Conversational Entities, or ''chatterbots,'' initiate thousands of ''chats'' daily with unsuspecting Internet users who believe they are conversing with other human beings. By mimicking the behavioral characteristics of natural conversation, these chatterbots trigger the inference of another mind. It is one thing to fool someone into believing that computer-generated text originated from a live source. The brain, after all, did not evolve to process the veracity of text message authorship. Fooling the brain's perceptual systems is a taller order. The human brain employs several perceptual Turing Tests devoted to scrutinizing faces, movements, and voices for evidence of minds worth modeling. The facial Turing Test: it looks like it has a mind It is hard to overstate the importance of the face as a social stimulus. Faces identify people, display mental states, and are evaluated along a host of dimensions (e.g., attractiveness, maturity, trustworthiness). Faces are important for the very reason that their root word suggests: they serve as the façades of other minds. Commensurate with this importance, faces capture attention faster than other objects This ability was recently investigated by Wheatley, Weinberg, Looser, Moran, and Hajcak Participants were asked to simply split an ordered row of faces (e.g., Other researchers have investigated the characteristics of movement that evoke the perception of a mind, including ''non-Newtonian'' velocity changes The vocal Turing Test: it sounds like it has a mind The voice has been referred to as an ''auditory face Summary: mind detection Mind-imposters are easy to come by. Mannequins have faces and eyes, robots move, and automated messages speak. Yet we know that manufactured faces, mechanical motion, and programmed speech do not belong to another mind. These simple qualities are enough to catch our attention and initially fool our low-level detection processes. But the human mind has a more discerning model of what it means to have a mind, and these primitive copies are quickly discarded as non-minds. This allows us to study the clothes on a mannequin without engaging with it, to crash robotic toys together in mock-battle without remorse, and to hang up on the automated solicitor mid-sentence. Indeed, doing any of these things (conversing with a mannequin; apologizing to a toy; adhering to social niceties with a recording) would be considered aberrant behavior. The healthy human brain institutes multiple levels of perceptual scrutiny in order to discriminate true minds from mind imposters

Basin tectonic history and paleo-physiography of the pelagian platform, northern Tunisia, using vitrinite reflectance data

Constraining the thermal, burial and uplift/exhumation history of sedimentary basins is crucial in the understanding of upper crustal strain evolution and also has implications for understanding the nature and timing of hydrocarbon maturation and migration. In this study, we use Vitrinite Reflectance (VR) data to elucidate the paleo‐physiography and thermal history of an inverted basin in the foreland of the Atlasic orogeny in Northern Tunisia. In doing so, it is the primary aim of this study to demonstrate how VR techniques may be applied to unravel basin subsidence/uplift history of structural domains and provide valuable insights into the kinematic evolution of sedimentary basins. VR measurements of both the onshore Pelagian Platform and the Tunisian Furrow in Northern Tunisia are used to impose constraints on the deformation history of a long‐lived structural feature in the studied region, namely the Zaghouan Fault. Previous work has shown that this fault was active as an extensional structure in Lower Jurassic to Aptian times, before subsequently being inverted during the Late Cretaceous Eocene Atlas I tectonic event and Upper Miocene Atlas II tectonic event. Quantifying and constraining this latter inversion stage, and shedding light on the roles of structural inheritance and the basin thermal history, are secondary aims of this study. The results of this study show that the Atlas II WNW‐ESE compressive event deformed both the Pelagian Platform and the Tunisian Furrow during Tortonian‐Messinian times. Maximum burial depth for the Pelagian Platform was reached during the Middle to Upper Miocene, i.e. prior to the Atlas II folding event. VR measurements indicate that the Cretaceous to Ypresian section of the Pelagian Platform was buried to a maximum burial depth of ~3 km, using a geothermal gradient of 30°C/km. Cretaceous rock samples VR values show that the hanging wall of the Zaghouan Fault was buried to a maximum depth of <2 km. This suggests that a vertical km‐scale throw along the Zaghouan Fault pre‐dated the Atlas II shortening, and also proves that the fault controlled the subsidence of the Pelagian Platform during the Oligo‐Miocene. Mean exhumation rates of the Pelagian Platform throughout the Messinian to Quaternary were in the order of 0.3 mm/year. However, when the additional effect of Tortonian‐Messinian folding is accounted for, exhumation rates could have reached 0.6-0.7 mm/year

First insights into the ISM at z > 8 with JWST: Possible physical implications of a high [O iii] λ4363/[O iii] λ5007

We present a detailed analysis of the rest-frame optical emission line ratios for three spectroscopically confirmed galaxies at z &gt; 7.5. The galaxies were identified in the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Early Release Observations field SMACS J0723.3 - 7327. By quantitatively comparing Balmer and oxygen line ratios of these galaxies with various low-redshift 'analogue' populations (e.g. Green Peas, Blueberries, etc.), we show that no single analogue population captures the diversity of line ratios of all three galaxies observed at z &gt; 7.5. We find that S06355 at z = 7.67 and S10612 at z = 7.66 are similar to local Green Peas and Blueberries. In contrast, S04590 at z = 8.50 appears to be significantly different from the other two galaxies, most resembling extremely low-metallicity systems in the local Universe. Perhaps the most striking spectral feature in S04590 is the curiously high [O iii] λ4363/[O iii] λ5007 ratio (RO3) of 0.048 (or 0.055 when dust-corrected), implying either extremely high electron temperatures, &gt;3 × 104 K, or gas densities &gt;104 cm-3. Observed line ratios indicate that this galaxy is unlikely to host an AGN. Using photoionization modelling, we show that the inclusion of high-mass X-ray binaries or a high cosmic ray background in addition to a young, low-metallicity stellar population can provide the additional heating necessary to explain the observed high RO3 while remaining consistent with other observed line ratios. Our models represent a first step at accurately characterizing the dominant sources of photoionization and heating at very high redshifts, demonstrating that non-thermal processes may become important as we probe deeper into the Epoch of Reionization

Exploring embodiment through martial arts and combat sports: a review of empirical research

Since the late 1970s, social scientists have turned considerable attention to investigating martial arts and combat sports (MACS). In particular, this broad range of fighting disciplines has been shown to offer numerous avenues for scholarly enquiry into social change and personal transformation via processes of embodiment. Adopting a thematic structure, we assess the empirical literature in this area via four interconnecting categories pertaining to MACS and embodiment: (1) body cultures; (2) body pedagogies; (3) the embodiment of gender; and (4) bodily harm. Following this review, we identify several gaps in the existing literature, suggesting potential new topics and strategies for research connecting to the social world of physical culture more generally

How well do computer-generated faces tap face expertise?

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

MOONRISE: The Main MOONS GTO Extragalactic Survey

The MOONS instrument possesses an exceptional combination of large multiplexing, high sensitivity, broad simultaneous spectral coverage (from optical to near-infrared bands), large patrol area and high fibre density. These properties provide the unprecedented potential of enabling, for the very first time, SDSS-like surveys around Cosmic Noon (z~1-2.5), when the star formation rate in the Universe peaked. The high-quality spectra delivered by MOONS will sample the same nebular and stellar diagnostics observed in extensive surveys of local galaxies, providing an accurate and consistent description of the evolution of various physical properties of galaxies, and hence a solid test of different scenarios of galaxy formation and transformation. Most importantly, by spectroscopically identifying hundreds of thousands of galaxies at high redshift, the MOONS surveys will be capable of determining the environments in which primeval galaxies lived and will reveal how such environments affected galaxy evolution. In this article, we specifically focus on the main Guaranteed Time Observation (GTO) MOONS extragalactic survey, MOONRISE, by providing an overview of its scientific goals and observing strategy

The chemical enrichment in the early Universe as probed by JWST via direct metallicity measurements at z ∼ 8

We analyse the chemical properties of three z∼ 8 galaxies behind the galaxy cluster SMACS J0723.3-7327, observed as part of the Early Release Observations programme of the James Webb Space Telescope. Exploiting [O III]λ4363 auroral line detections in NIRSpec spectra, we robustly apply the direct Te method for the very first time at such high redshift, measuring metallicities ranging from extremely metal poor (12 + log(O/H)≈ 7) to about one-third solar. We also discuss the excitation properties of these sources, and compare them with local strong-line metallicity calibrations. We find that none of the considered diagnostics match simultaneously the observed relations between metallicity and strong-line ratios for the three sources, implying that a proper re-assessment of the calibrations may be needed at these redshifts. On the mass-metallicity plane, the two galaxies at z ∼ 7.6 (log(M∗/M☉) = 8.1, 8.7) have metallicities that are consistent with the extrapolation of the mass-metallicity relation at z∼2-3, while the least massive galaxy at z ∼ 8.5 (log(M∗/M☉) = 7.8) shows instead a significantly lower metallicity. The three galaxies show different level of offset relative to the Fundamental Metallicity Relation, with two of them (at z∼ 7.6) being marginally consistent, while the z∼ 8.5 source deviating significantly, being probably far from the smooth equilibrium between gas flows, star formation, and metal enrichment in place at later epochs

JWST NIRCam + NIRSpec: Interstellar medium and stellar populations of young galaxies with rising star formation and evolving gas reservoirs

We present an interstellar medium and stellar population analysis of three spectroscopically confirmed z &gt; 7 galaxies in the Early Release Observations JWST/NIRCam and JWST/NIRSpec data of the SMACS J0723.3-7327 cluster. We use the Bayesian spectral energy distribution-fitting code PROSPECTOR with a flexible star formation history (SFH), a variable dust attenuation law, and a self-consistent model of nebular emission (continuum and emission lines). Importantly, we self-consistently fit both the emission line fluxes from JWST/NIRSpec and the broad-band photometry from JWST/NIRCam, taking into account slit-loss effects. We find that these three z=7.6-8.5 galaxies (M-* approximate to 10(8) M-circle dot) are young with rising SFHs and mass-weighted ages of 3-4 Myr, though we find indications for underlying older stellar populations. The inferred gas-phase metallicities broadly agree with the direct metallicity estimates from the auroral lines. The galaxy with the lowest gas-phase metallicity (Z(gas) = 0.06 Z(circle dot)) has a steeply rising SFH, is very compact ( &lt;0.2 kpc), and has a high star formation rate surface density (Sigma(SFR) approximate to 22 M-circle dot yr(-1) kpc(-2)), consistent with rapid gas accretion. The two other objects with higher gas-phase metallicities show more complex multicomponent morphologies on kpc scales, indicating that their recent increase in star formation rate is driven by mergers or internal, gravitational instabilities. We discuss effects of assuming different SFH priors or only fitting the photometric data. Our analysis highlights the strength and importance of combining JWST imaging and spectroscopy for fully assessing the nature of galaxies at the earliest epochs