Emotional Facial Expression Detection in the Peripheral Visual Field

BACKGROUND: In everyday life, signals of danger, such as aversive facial expressions, usually appear in the peripheral visual field. Although facial expression processing in central vision has been extensively studied, this processing in peripheral vision has been poorly studied. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Using behavioral measures, we explored the human ability to detect fear and disgust vs. neutral expressions and compared it to the ability to discriminate between genders at eccentricities up to 40°. Responses were faster for the detection of emotion compared to gender. Emotion was detected from fearful faces up to 40° of eccentricity. CONCLUSIONS: Our results demonstrate the human ability to detect facial expressions presented in the far periphery up to 40° of eccentricity. The increasing advantage of emotion compared to gender processing with increasing eccentricity might reflect a major implication of the magnocellular visual pathway in facial expression processing. This advantage may suggest that emotion detection, relative to gender identification, is less impacted by visual acuity and within-face crowding in the periphery. These results are consistent with specific and automatic processing of danger-related information, which may drive attention to those messages and allow for a fast behavioral reaction

Students' design of a biometric procedure in upper secondary school

International audienceMaking the connection between science and technology might be important for students to learn to identify and solve problems and to acquire scientific knowledge and skills. The research reported in this article concerned the development of a design situation in a science classroom and the study of students performing in this situation. More specifically, the setting involved students' design of a measurement procedure as a way of attaining understanding of the underlying scientific concepts. In fact, at higher secondary level, the classical experimental procedure of measuring facial angle is employed within the topic of human evolution to find out to which species a given human cranium belongs. At the same time, designing a procedure, instead of just executing it, is thought to entail higher odds for attaining teleological understanding. The development of the learning situation involved pursuing parallels between the expert design task as described in the literature and the assignment given to students. We proceeded through step-wise development of the learning situation that was successively tested out in the classroom. Our analysis of the student-devised procedures revealed three issues regarding the graphical representation of angles, the reproducibility of the points and the communicational demands of the situation. Students used both prior knowledge (e.g. about evolution), and new knowledge about cranium anatomy and angles. They also exhibited new experimental skills like anticipating each experimental action. Such cognitive tasks which are at the origin of students' activity make the situation approximate the goals of laboratory work by distancing it from the simple execution of a series of steps. Future research could be directed towards further exploring the benefits of an approach that combines essential characteristics of science and technology

Maternal dietary omega-3 deficiency worsens the deleterious effects of prenatal inflammation on the gut-brain axis in the offspring across lifetime

Maternal immune activation (MIA) and poor maternal nutritional habits are risk factors for the occurrence of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD). Human studies show the deleterious impact of prenatal inflammation and low n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) intake on neurodevelopment with long-lasting consequences on behavior. However, the mechanisms linking maternal nutritional status to MIA are still unclear, despite their relevance to the etiology of NDD. We demonstrate here that low maternal n-3 PUFA intake worsens MIA-induced early gut dysfunction, including modification of gut microbiota composition and higher local inflammatory reactivity. These deficits correlate with alterations of microglia-neuron crosstalk pathways and have long-lasting effects, both at transcriptional and behavioral levels. This work highlights the perinatal period as a critical time window, especially regarding the role of the gut-brain axis in neurodevelopment, elucidating the link between MIA, poor nutritional habits, and NDD