Owning the Dance: Michael Jackson's Movement Signature

The development of Michael Jackson's movement signature can be traced through evolution of his style, from his inspirations to his professional and personal career paths, as well as the impact of his psychological makeup on the way he approached dance. His movement signature was the manifestation of his neurotic perfectionism and self-perceived isolation, in conjunction with the unequaled clarity of his movement and the brilliant spark that was his stage presence. The commercial distribution of Jackson as a complete entertainment package, the continuity of his style throughout his career, the accessibility of his art, and his unique talent as a dancer and as a performer inextricably linked the movement signature to the man

Reduced face identity aftereffects in relatives of children with autism.

Autism is a pervasive developmental condition with complex aetiology. To aid the discovery of genetic mechanisms, researchers have turned towards identifying potential endophenotypes - subtle neurobiological or neurocognitive traits present in individuals with autism and their "unaffected" relatives. Previous research has shown that relatives of individuals with autism exhibit face processing atypicalities, which are similar in nature albeit of lesser degree, to those found in children and adults with autism. Yet very few studies have examined the underlying mechanisms responsible for such atypicalities. Here, we investigated whether atypicalities in adaptive norm-based coding of faces are present in relatives of children with autism, similar to those previously reported in children with autism. To test this possibility, we administered a face identity aftereffect task in which adaptation to a particular face biases perception towards the opposite identity, so that a previously neutral face (i.e., the average face) takes on the computationally opposite identity. Parents and siblings of individuals with autism showed smaller aftereffects compared to parents and siblings of typically developing children, especially so when the adapting stimuli were located further away from the average face. In addition, both groups showed stronger aftereffects for adaptors far from the average than for adaptors closer to the average. These results suggest that, in relatives of children with autism, face-coding mechanism are similar (i.e., norm-based) but less efficient than in relatives of typical children. This finding points towards the possibility that diminished adaptive mechanisms might represent a neurocognitive endophenotype for autism

Testing the functional basis of first impressions : Dimensions for children’s faces are not the same as for adults’ faces

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Do facial first impressions reflect a shared social reality?

Influential facial impression models have repeatedly shown that trustworthiness, youthful-attractiveness and dominance dimensions subserve a wide variety of first impressions formed from strangers’ faces, suggestive of a shared social reality. However, these models are built from impressions aggregated across observers. Critically, recent work has now shown that inter-observer agreement in facial impressions is less than perfect, raising the important question of whether these dimensional models are meaningful at the individual-observer level. We addressed this question using a novel case series approach, building individual models of facial impressions for different observers. Strikingly, three dimensions of trustworthiness, youthful/attractiveness and competence/dominance appeared across the majority of individual observer models, demonstrating that the dimensional approach is indeed meaningful at the individual level. Nonetheless, we also found striking differences in the stability of the competence/dominance dimension across observers. Taken together, results suggest that individual differences in impressions arise in the context of a largely common structure that supports a shared social reality

Adaptive norm-based coding of facial identity

AbstractIdentification of a face is facilitated by adapting to its computationally opposite identity, suggesting that the average face functions as a norm for coding identity [Leopold, D. A., O’Toole, A. J., Vetter, T., & Blanz, V. (2001). Prototype-referenced shape encoding revealed by high-level aftereffects. Nature Neuroscience, 4, 89–94; Leopold, D. A., Rhodes, G., Müller, K. -M., & Jeffery, L. (2005). The dynamics of visual adaptation to faces. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 272, 897–904]. Crucially, this interpretation requires that the aftereffect is selective for the opposite identity, but this has not been convincingly demonstrated. We demonstrate such selectivity, observing a larger aftereffect for opposite than non-opposite adapt-test pairs that are matched on perceptual contrast (dissimilarity). Component identities were also harder to detect in morphs of opposite than non-opposite face pairs. We propose an adaptive norm-based coding model of face identity

The timecourse of higher-level face aftereffects

AbstractPerceptual aftereffects for simple visual attributes processed early in the cortical hierarchy increase logarithmically with adapting duration and decay exponentially with test duration. This classic timecourse has been reported recently for a face identity aftereffect [Leopold, D. A., Rhodes, G., Müller, K.-M., & Jeffery, L. (2005). The dynamics of visual adaptation to faces. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 272, 897–904], suggesting that the dynamics of visual adaptation may be similar throughout the visual system. An alternative interpretation, however, is that the classic timecourse is a flow-on effect of adaptation of a low-level, retinotopic component of the face identity aftereffect. Here, we examined the timecourse of the higher-level (size-invariant) components of two face aftereffects, the face identity aftereffect and the figural face aftereffect. Both showed the classic pattern of logarithmic build-up and exponential decay. These results indicate that the classic timecourse of face aftereffects is not a flow-on effect of low-level retinotopic adaptation, and support the hypothesis that dynamics of visual adaptation are similar at higher and lower levels of the cortical visual hierarchy. They also reinforce the perceptual nature of face aftereffects, ruling out demand characteristics and other post-perceptual factors as plausible accounts

Adults’ facial impressions of children’s niceness, but not shyness, show modest accuracy

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to the parents and children who helped make this research possible. We would also like to thank Romina Palermo for providing us the opportunity to contact her sample of parent and child participants, and to use some of her existing data. Finally, we would like to thank the examiners who provided thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this paper presented in a thesis. JC, CS, LJ and GR conceived the study and edited the manuscript. JC programmed the experiment, collected undergraduate participant data, performed the statistical analyses, and drafted the first manuscript. EB coordinated image collection. All authors participated in the study design, and read and approved the final manuscript. Funding: This research was supported by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence Grant award to GR [CE110001021], ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award to CS [DE190101043], ARC Discovery Award to GR and CS [DP170104602], ARC Discovery Award to LJ [DP140101743] and a Research Training Program Stipend to JC.Peer reviewedPostprin