Cultural modulation of face and gaze scanning in young children

Previous research has demonstrated that the way human adults look at others’ faces is modulated by their cultural background, but very little is known about how such a culture-specific pattern of face gaze develops. The current study investigated the role of cultural background on the development of face scanning in young children between the ages of 1 and 7 years, and its modulation by the eye gaze direction of the face. British and Japanese participants’ eye movements were recorded while they observed faces moving their eyes towards or away from the participants. British children fixated more on the mouth whereas Japanese children fixated more on the eyes, replicating the results with adult participants. No cultural differences were observed in the differential responses to direct and averted gaze. The results suggest that different patterns of face scanning exist between different cultures from the first years of life, but differential scanning of direct and averted gaze associated with different cultural norms develop later in life

Mindblind eyes: an absence of spontaneous theory of mind in Asperger syndrome

Adults with Asperger syndrome can understand mental states such as desires and beliefs (mentalizing) when explicitly prompted to do so, despite having impairments in social communication. We directly tested the hypothesis that such individuals nevertheless fail to mentalize spontaneously. To this end, we used an eye-tracking task that has revealed the spontaneous ability to mentalize in typically developing infants. We showed that, like infants, neurotypical adults’ (n = 17 participants) eye movements anticipated an actor’s behavior on the basis of her false belief. This was not the case for individuals with Asperger syndrome (n = 19). Thus, these individuals do not attribute mental states spontaneously, but they may be able to do so in explicit tasks through compensatory learning

Thickness of the basement membrane of bronchial epithelial cells in lung diseases as determined by transbronchial biopsy

AbstractThe thickness of the basement membranes of bronchial epithelial cells varies under various pathological conditions. It has been reported that this membrane is thickened in patients with bronchial asthma. By light microscopy, this parameter was measured in biopsy specimens of bronchial mucosa obtained by fibre-optic bronchoscopy. These specimens were obtained from 171 patients who had undergone bronchial biopsy between 1984 and 1994. It was demonstrated that the thickness of the basement membrane of bronchial epithelial cells was weakly correlated with the patient's age, when thickness was examined in patients with lung cancer (r=0·242, P=0·0268). The basement membranes in patients with bronchial asthma (8·193 ± 1·362 μ, mean ± sem) were significantly thicker than those without bronchial asthma (5·145 ± 0·233 μ) (P=0·0180, Mann-Whitney's U-test). In addition, it is noteworthy that the basement membranes in patients with diabetes mellitus (7·217 ± 0·753 μ) were also significantly thicker than those without diabetes mellitus (4·968 ± 0·235 μ) (P=0·0038, Mann-Whitney's U-test). The background or underlying pathophysiology in such patients should be studied further, with attention directed towards the thickness of the bronchial basement membrane in bronchial biopsy specimens

The development and neural basis of referential gaze perception

Infants are sensitive to the referential information conveyed by others’ eye gaze, which could be one of the developmental foundations of theory of mind. To investigate the neural correlates of gaze–object relations, we recorded ERPs from adults and 9-month-old infants while they watched scenes containing gaze shifts either towards or away from the location of a preceding object. In adults, object-incongruent gaze shifts elicited enhanced ERP amplitudes over the occipito-temporal area (N330). In infants, a similar posterior ERP component (N290) was greater for object-incongruent gaze shifts, which suggests that by the age of 9 months infants encode referential information of gaze in a similar way to adults. In addition, in infants we observed an early frontal ERP component (anterior N200), which showed higher amplitude in response to the perception of object-congruent gaze shifts. This component may reflect fast-track processing of socially relevant information, such as the detection of communicative or informative situations, and could form a developmental foundation for attention sharing, social learning and theory of mind

Selective learning and teaching among Japanese and German children

Despite an increasing number of studies demonstrating that young children selectively learn from others, and a few studies of children’s selective teaching, the evidence almost exclusively comes from Western cultures, and cross-cultural comparison in this line of work is very rare. In the present research, we investigated Japanese and German children’s selective learning and teaching abilities. We found clear cultural differences. Japanese children were better at selectively teaching an ignorant person over a knowledgeable person than at selectively learning from knowledgeable others. By contrast, German children were better at choosing to learn from a knowledgeable rather than from an ignorant person than at selectively teaching ignorant others. The present findings suggest that the development of human learning and teaching, especially the tendency to take into account others' knowledge status, is strongly affected by cultural background

Presence of contagious yawning in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Most previous studies suggest diminished susceptibility to contagious yawning in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, it could be driven by their atypical attention to the face. To test this hypothesis, children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children were shown yawning and control movies. To ensure participants' attention to the face, an eye tracker controlled the onset of the yawning and control stimuli. Results demonstrated that both TD children and children with ASD yawned more frequently when they watched the yawning stimuli than the control stimuli. It is suggested therefore that the absence of contagious yawning in children with ASD, as reported in previous studies, might relate to their weaker tendency to spontaneously attend to others' faces

Metacognition and mindreading in young children: a cross-cultural study

Prior studies document cross cultural variation in the developmental onset of mindreading. In particular, Japanese children are reported to pass a standard false belief task later than children from Western countries. By contrast, we know little about cross-cultural variation in young children’s metacognitive abilities. Moreover, one prominent theoretical discussion in developmental psychology focuses on the relation between metacognition and mindreading. Here we investigated the relation between mindreading and metacognition (both implicit and explicit) by testing 4-year-old Japanese and German children. We found no difference in metacognition between the two cultural groups. By contrast, Japanese children showed lower performance than German children replicating cultural differences in mindreading. Finally, metacognition and mindreading were not related in either group. We discuss the findings in light of the existing theoretical accounts of the relation between metacognition and mindreading

Precursors to social and communication difficulties in infants at-risk for autism: gaze following and attentional engagement

Whilst joint attention (JA) impairments in autism have been widely studied, little is known about the early development of gaze following, a precursor to establishing JA. We employed eye-tracking to record gaze following longitudinally in infants with and without a family history of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at 7 and 13 months. No group difference was found between at-risk and low-risk infants in gaze following behaviour at either age. However, despite following gaze successfully at 13 months, at-risk infants with later emerging socio-communication difficulties (both those with ASD and atypical development at 36 months of age) allocated less attention to the congruent object compared to typically developing at-risk siblings and low-risk controls. The findings suggest that the subtle emergence of difficulties in JA in infancy may be related to ASD and other atypical outcomes

Physiological arousal explains infant gaze following in various social contexts

Gaze-following is fundamental to central aspects of human sociocognitive development, such as acquiring language and cultural learning. Studies have shown that infant gaze-following is not a simple reflexive orientation to an adult’s eye movement. In contrast, infants adaptively modulate gaze-following behaviour depending on the social context. However, arguably, the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying contextual modulation of gaze-following remain somewhat unexplored. In this study, we tested the proposition about whether the contextual modulation of infant gaze-following is mediated by the infant’s heart rate, which indicates infant’s physiological arousal. Forty-one 6- to 9-month-old infants participated in this study, and infants observed either a reliable face, which looked towards the location of an object or, an unreliable face, which looked away from the location of an object. Thereafter, the infants watched a video of the same model making eye contact or not making any ostensive signals, before shifting their gaze towards one of the two objects. We revealed that reliability and eye contact acted independently to increase heart rate, which then fully mediates the effects of these social cues on the frequency of gaze-following. Results suggest that each social cue independently enhances physiological arousal, which then accumulatively predicts the likelihood of infant gaze-following behaviour

Affective priming enhances gaze cueing effect

Other’s gaze direction triggers a reflexive shift of attention known as the gaze cueing effect . F earful facial expressions are further reported to enhance th e gaze cueing effect , 3 but it remains unclear whether this facilitative effect is specific to gaze cues or the result of more general increase in attentional resources due to affective arousal. We examined the effects of affective priming on the cueing effects of gaze and arrow stimuli in the Posner cueing task. Participants were primed with two types of briefly presented affective stimuli (neutral, threatening )), and the target location was cued either by an arrow or a gaze cue in a neutral face. Gaze cues were preceded by the same face with its eyes closed or directed to the viewer . Study 1 (n = 26) assessed the cueing effect using manual key press , and Study 2 (n = 30) employed gaze contingent eye tracking techniques to assess the cueing effect using time to first fixat e the cued target location. Both studies found that threatening priming significa ntly enhanced the cueing effects of eye gaze but not arrow stimuli. The results therefore suggest that affective priming does not facilitate general attentional orienting, but the facilitation is more specific to social cues such as eye gaze