Modulation of Face-sensitive Event-related Potentials by Canonical and Distorted Human Faces: The Role of Vertical Symmetry and Up-Down Featural Arrangement

The study examined the sensitivity of early face-sensitive ERP components to the disruption of two structural properties embedded in faces, namely up-down featural arrangement and vertical asymmetry. Response times and ERPs were recorded as adults made an orientation judgment on canonical faces and distorted faces that had been manipulated for either or both of the mentioned properties. The P1, the N170 and the VPP allexhibited a similar linear increase in amplitude or latency as the properties were disrupted in the order of 1) up-down featural arrangement, 2) vertical symmetry, and 3) both up-down featural arrangement and vertical symmetry. Exceptions to this finding were seen for the amplitudes of the N170 and VPP, which were larger for the stimulus in which vertical symmetry was disrupted. Interestingly, the enhanced amplitudes of the N170 and VPP are consistent with impaired behavioral performance on the orientation judgment observed for this stimulus

By the sound of it:an ERP investigation of human action sound processing in 7-month-old infants

Recent evidence suggests that human adults perceive human action sounds as a distinct category from human vocalizations, environmental, and mechanical sounds, activating different neural networks (Engel et al., 2009 and Lewis et al., 2011). Yet, little is known about the development of such specialization. Using event-related potentials (ERP), this study investigated neural correlates of 7-month-olds’ processing of human action (HA) sounds in comparison to human vocalizations (HV), environmental (ENV), and mechanical (MEC) sounds. Relative to the other categories, HA sounds led to increased positive amplitudes between 470 and 570 ms post-stimulus onset at left anterior temporal locations, while HV led to increased negative amplitudes at the more posterior temporal locations in both hemispheres. Collectively, human produced sounds (HA + HV) led to significantly different response profiles compared to non-living sound sources (ENV + MEC) at parietal and frontal locations in both hemispheres. Overall, by 7 months of age human action sounds are being differentially processed in the brain, consistent with a dichotomy for processing living versus non-living things. This provides novel evidence regarding the typical categorical processing of socially relevant sounds

Operational Momentum During Ordering Operations for Size and Number in 4-Month-Old Infants

An Operational Momentum (OM) effect is shown by 9-month-old infants during non-symbolic arithmetic, whereby they overestimate the outcomes to addition problems, and underestimate the outcomes to subtraction problems. Recent evidence has shown that this effect extends to ordering operations for size-based sequences in 12-month-olds. Here we provide evidence that OM occurs for ordering operations involving numerical sequences containing multiple quantity cues, but not size-based sequences, already at 4 months of age. Infants were tested in an ordinal task in which they detected and represented increasing or decreasing variations in physical and/or numerical size, and then responded to ordinal sequences that exhibited greater or lesser sizes/numerosities, thus following or violating the OM generated during habituation. Results showed that OM was absent during size ordering (Experiment 1), but was present when infants ordered arrays of discrete elements varying on numerical and non-numerical dimensions, if both number and continuous magnitudes were available cues to discriminate between with-OM and against-OM sequences during test trials (Experiments 2 vs. 3). The presence of momentum for ordering number only when provided with multiple cues of magnitude changes suggests that OM is a complex phenomenon that blends multiple representations of magnitude early in infancy

Seeing touches early in life

Addabbo M, Longhi E, Bolognini N, et al. Seeing touches early in life. PLoS ONE. 2015;10(9): e0134549

Individual differences in object-examining duration: do they reflect the use of different encoding strategies?

Much evidence has shown that individual differences in the duration of visual fixation in infancy are related to processing of wholistic versus featural properties of the stimuli. In the present study, an object-examining technique was used with 8-month-old infants to test the hypothesis that infants who display differential attention durations to visuo-manually presented stimuli will vary in their processing of wholistic versus featural aspects of the stimuli. The results confirmed the hypothesis, indicating that, after being familiarized with an object comprised of both global and local properties, long examiners attended more to an object comprised of new-local rather than new-global aspects, whereas short examiners attended more to the new-global rather than the new-local object. These findings provide support to the contention of the existence of close similarities between visual fixation and object-examining measures as indexes of infant information processing, extending the convergences between the two measures to the domain of individual differences. \ua9 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved

Natural experience modulates the processing of older adult faces in young adults and 3-year-old children.

Just like other face dimensions, age influences the way faces are processed by adults as well as by children. However, it remains unclear under what conditions exactly such influence occurs at both ages, in that there is some mixed evidence concerning the presence of a systematic processing advantage for peer faces (own-age bias) across the lifespan. Inconsistency in the results may stem from the fact that the individual's face representation adapts to represent the most predominant age traits of the faces present in the environment, which is reflective of the individual's specific living conditions and social experience. In the current study we investigated the processing of younger and older adult faces in two groups of adults (Experiment 1) and two groups of 3-year-old children (Experiment 2) who accumulated different amounts of experience with elderly people. Contact with elderly adults influenced the extent to which both adult and child participants showed greater discrimination abilities and stronger sensitivity to configural/featural cues in younger versus older adult faces, as measured by the size of the inversion effect. In children, the size of the inversion effect for older adult faces was also significantly correlated with the amount of contact with elderly people. These results show that, in both adults and children, visual experience with older adult faces can tune perceptual processing strategies to the point of abolishing the discrimination disadvantage that participants typically manifest for those faces in comparison to younger adult faces

Are numbers, size and brightness equally efficient in orienting visual attention? Evidence from an eye-tracking study.

A number of studies have shown strong relations between numbers and oriented spatial codes. For example, perceiving numbers causes spatial shifts of attention depending upon numbers' magnitude, in a way suggestive of a spatially oriented, mental representation of numbers. Here, we investigated whether this phenomenon extends to non-symbolic numbers, as well as to the processing of the continuous dimensions of size and brightness, exploring whether different quantitative dimensions are equally mapped onto space. After a numerical (symbolic Arabic digits or non-symbolic arrays of dots; Experiment 1) or a non-numerical cue (shapes of different size or brightness level; Experiment 2) was presented, participants' saccadic response to a target that could appear either on the left or the right side of the screen was registered using an automated eye-tracker system. Experiment 1 showed that, both in the case of Arabic digits and dot arrays, right targets were detected faster when preceded by large numbers, and left targets were detected faster when preceded by small numbers. Participants in Experiment 2 were faster at detecting right targets when cued by large-sized shapes and left targets when cued by small-sized shapes, whereas brightness cues did not modulate the detection of peripheral targets. These findings indicate that looking at a symbolic or a non-symbolic number induces attentional shifts to a peripheral region of space that is congruent with the numbers' relative position on a mental number line, and that a similar shift in visual attention is induced by looking at shapes of different size. More specifically, results suggest that, while the dimensions of number and size spontaneously map onto an oriented space, the dimension of brightness seems to be independent at a certain level of magnitude elaboration from the dimensions of spatial extent and number, indicating that not all continuous dimensions are equally mapped onto space

Natural experience acquired in adulthood enhances holistic processing of other-age faces

Adults have been shown to perform better when recognizing adult faces in comparison to their performance when recognizing faces of different ages, resulting in an other-age effect (OAE) that resembles the well-known other-race effect (ORE). Both the OAE and ORE have been proposed to be experience dependent. In the current study, we used the composite-face paradigm with adult- and child-face stimuli to test holistic processing abilities of two groups of participants, a group of child novices and a group of preschool teachers. Our results demonstrate that novices do engage in holistic processing with both child and adult faces. However, the data also show that, for child faces, teachers used holistic processing to a greater extent than do novices. Moreover, teachers also engaged in holistic processing to a greater extent with child faces than with adult faces. These data suggest that experience likely plays a critical role in tuning holistic processing strategies towards specific types of faces. © 2008 Psychology Press

Mean accuracy rates of 3-years-old children in the low-experienced group (a) and in the high-experienced group (b) when younger and older adult faces were presented upright and inverted.

<p>Error bars represent standard errors of the means.</p

Examples of the younger adult and older adult faces stimuli used in the study.

<p>Examples of the younger adult and older adult faces stimuli used in the study.</p