RESUMEN

Humans are often tasked to remember new faces so that they can recognize the faces later in time. Previous studies found that memory reports for basic visual features (e.g., colors and shapes) are susceptible to systematic distortions as a result of comparison with new visual input, especially when the input is perceived as similar to the memory. The current study tested whether this similarity-induced memory bias (SIMB) would also occur with more complex face stimuli. The results showed that faces that are just perceptually encoded into visual working memory as well as retrieved from visual long-term memory are also susceptible to SIMB. Furthermore, once induced, SIMB persisted over time across cues through which the face memory was accessed for memory report. These results demonstrate the generalizability of SIMB to more complex and practically relevant stimuli, and thus, suggest potential real-world implications.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to detect functional changes in the brain during the memory task with aging and the association between functional changes and memory performance. METHOD: The study consisted of Young Adult Group (YAG, n=20) aged 20 to 25 and Late Adult Group (LAG, n=18) aged 60 to 70. Individuals with Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) scores above 21 and no family history of Alzheimer's Disease were included in the study. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanning was performed on all participants during a memory task including encoding (face and name), face and name recognition sub-tasks. RESULTS: Results indicated that LAG showed increased activity during face recognition task in left posterior cingulate cortex, left superior frontal cortex, left fusiform face area and another increased activity was found out during name recognition task in left superior frontal cortex, right prefrontal cortex, left anterior + posterior cingulate cortex. The accuracy of face recognition and name recognition memory tests were significantly lower in LAG (respectively, p=0.026; p=0.001). CONCLUSION: These results indicated that advanced age were associated with more widespread activation in brain during memory task. Thus with aging, individuals require more neuronal and cognitive resources during memory processing.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

It is estimated that 10% to 20% of road accidents are related to fatigue, with accidents caused by drowsiness up to twice as deadly as those caused by other factors. In order to reduce these numbers, strategies such as advertising campaigns, the implementation of driving recorders in vehicles used for road transport of goods and passengers, or the use of drowsiness detection systems in cars have been implemented. Within the scope of the latter area, the technologies used are diverse. They can be based on the measurement of signals such as steering wheel movement, vehicle position on the road, or driver monitoring. Driver monitoring is a technology that has been exploited little so far and can be implemented in many different approaches. This work addresses the evaluation of a multidimensional drowsiness index based on the recording of facial expressions, gaze direction, and head position and studies the feasibility of its implementation in a low-cost electronic package. Specifically, the aim is to determine the driver's state by monitoring their facial expressions, such as the frequency of blinking, yawning, eye-opening, gaze direction, and head position. For this purpose, an algorithm capable of detecting drowsiness has been developed. Two approaches are compared: Facial recognition based on Haar features and facial recognition based on Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG). The implementation has been carried out on a Raspberry Pi, a low-cost device that allows the creation of a prototype that can detect drowsiness and interact with peripherals such as cameras or speakers. The results show that the proposed multi-index methodology performs better in detecting drowsiness than algorithms based on one-index detection.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Two experiments explored the search for pairs of faces in a disjunctive dual-target face search (DDTFS) task for unfamiliar face targets. The distinctiveness of the target was manipulated such that both faces were typical or distinctive or contained one typical and one distinctive target. Targets were searched for in arrays of eight faces. In Experiment 1, participants completed a DDTFS block with targets learnt over the block of trials. In Experiment 2, the dual-target block was preceded by two training blocks of single-target trials. Participants also completed the upright and inverted long-form Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT+). The results showed that searching for two typical faces leads to one target being prioritised at the expense of the other. The ability to search for non-prioritised typical faces was associated with scores on the CFMT+. This association disappeared when faces were learnt before completing DDTFS. We interpret the findings in terms of the impact of typicality on face learning, individual differences in the ability to learn faces, and the involvement of capacity-limited working memory in the search for unfamiliar faces. The findings have implications for security-related situations where agents must search for multiple unfamiliar faces having been shown their images.

Security officers (e.g. police officers) are often required to be on the lookout for specific individuals or suspects. The present study shows that there is a profound challenge in finding unfamiliar targets when searching for more than one face at the same time. Importantly, the nature of this challenge depends on two factors: first, the relative typicality of the faces that are being sought at the same time, and second, the face processing ability of the searchers. The findings have implications for the design of the job roles and the recruitment of security officers tasked with searching for specific individuals.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Do people have accurate metacognition of non-uniformities in perceptual resolution across (i.e., eccentricity) and around (i.e., polar angle) the visual field? Despite its theoretical and practical importance, this question has not yet been empirically tested. This study investigated metacognition of perceptual resolution by guessing patterns during a degradation (i.e., loss of high spatial frequencies) localization task. Participants localized the degraded face among the nine faces that simultaneously appeared throughout the visual field: fovea (fixation at the center of the screen), parafovea (left, right, above, and below fixation at 4° eccentricity), and periphery (left, right, above, and below fixation at 10° eccentricity). We presumed that if participants had accurate metacognition, in the absence of a degraded face, they would exhibit compensatory guessing patterns based on counterfactual reasoning ("The degraded face must have been presented at locations with lower perceptual resolution, because if it were presented at locations with higher perceptual resolution, I would have easily detected it."), meaning that we would expect more guess responses for locations with lower perceptual resolution. In two experiments, we observed guessing patterns that suggest that people can monitor non-uniformities in perceptual resolution across, but not around, the visual field during tasks, indicating partial in-the-moment metacognition. Additionally, we found that global explicit knowledge of perceptual resolution is not sufficient to guide in-the-moment metacognition during tasks, which suggests a dissociation between local and global metacognition.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Time of day can alter memory performance in general. Its influence on memory recognition performance for faces, which is important for daily encounters with new persons or testimonies, has not been investigated yet. Importantly, high levels of the stress hormone cortisol impair memory recognition, in particular for emotional material. However, some studies also reported high cortisol levels to enhance memory recognition. Since cortisol levels in the morning are usually higher than in the evening, time of day might also influence recognition performance. In this pre-registered study with a two-day design, 51 healthy men encoded pictures of male and female faces with distinct emotional expressions on day one around noon. Memory for the faces was retrieved two days later at two consecutive testing times either in the morning (high and moderately increased endogenous cortisol levels) or in the evening (low endogenous cortisol levels). Additionally, alertness as well as salivary cortisol levels at the different timepoints was assessed. Cortisol levels were significantly higher in the morning compared to the evening group as expected, while both groups did not differ in alertness. Familiarity ratings for female stimuli were significantly better when participants were tested during moderately increased endogenous cortisol levels in the morning than during low endogenous cortisol levels in the evening, a pattern which was previously also observed for stressed versus non-stressed participants. In addition, cortisol levels during that time in the morning were positively correlated with the recollection of face stimuli in general. Thus, recognition memory performance may depend on the time of day and as well as on stimulus type, such as the difference of male and female faces. Most importantly, the results suggest that cortisol may be meaningful and worth investigating when studying the effects of time of day on memory performance. This research offers both, insights into daily encounters as well as legally relevant domains as for instance testimonies.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Carragher and Hancock (2023) investigated how individuals performed in a one-to-one face matching task when assisted by an Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS). Across five pre-registered experiments they found evidence of suboptimal aided performance, with AFRS-assisted individuals consistently failing to reach the level of performance the AFRS achieved alone. The current study reanalyses these data (Carragher and Hancock, 2023), to benchmark automation-aided performance against a series of statistical models of collaborative decision making, spanning a range of efficiency levels. Analyses using a Bayesian hierarchical signal detection model revealed that collaborative performance was highly inefficient, falling closest to the most suboptimal models of automation dependence tested. This pattern of results generalises previous reports of suboptimal human-automation interaction across a range of visual search, target detection, sensory discrimination, and numeric estimation decision-making tasks. The current study is the first to provide benchmarks of automation-aided performance in the one-to-one face matching task.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

BACKGROUND: Our brain uses interoceptive signals from the body to shape how we perceive emotions in others; however, whether interoceptive signals can be manipulated to alter emotional perceptions is unknown. This registered report examined whether alcohol administration triggers physiological changes that alter interoceptive signals and manipulate emotional face processing. METHODS: Participants (n=36) were administered an alcohol or placebo beverage. Cardiovascular physiology (Heartrate variability, HRD) was recorded before and after administration. Participants completed a behavioral task in which emotional faces were presented in synchrony with different phases of the cardiac cycle (i.e., systole/diastole) to index of how interoceptive signals amplify them. HYPOTHESES: We hypothesized that alcohol administration would disrupt the cardiac amplification of emotional face processing. We further explored whether this disruption depended on the nature and magnitude of changes in cardiovascular physiology after alcohol administration. RESULTS: We observed no main effects or interactions between alcohol administration and emotional face processing. We found that HRV at baseline negatively correlated with the cardiac amplification of emotional faces. The extent to which alcohol impacted HRV negatively correlated with the cardiac amplification of angry faces. CONCLUSIONS: This registered report failed to validate the primary hypotheses but offers some evidence that the effects of alcohol on emotional face processing, if any, could be mediated via changes in basic physiological signals that are integrated via interoceptive mechanisms. Results are interpreted within the context of interoceptive inference and could feed novel perspectives for the interplay between physiological sensitivity and interoception in the development of drug-related behaviors.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Social deficits in schizophrenia have been attributed to an impaired attunement to mutual interaction, or "interaffectivity". While impairments in emotion recognition and facial expressivity in schizophrenia have been consistently reported, findings on mimicry and social synchrony are inconsistent, and previous studies have often lacked ecological validity. To investigate interaffective behavior in dyadic interactions in a real-world-like setting, 20 individuals with schizophrenia and 20 without mental disorder played a cooperative board game with a previously unacquainted healthy control participant. Facial expression analysis was conducted using Affectiva Emotion AI in iMotions 9.3. The contingency and state space distribution of emotional facial expressions was assessed using Mangold INTERACT. Psychotic symptoms, subjective stress, affectivity and game experience were evaluated through questionnaires. Due to a considerable between-group age difference, age-adjusted ANCOVA was performed. Overall, despite an unchanged subjective experience of the social interaction, individuals with schizophrenia exhibited reduced responsiveness to positive affective stimuli. Subjective game experience did not differ between groups. Descriptively, facial expressions in schizophrenia were generally more negative, with increased sadness and decreased joy. Facial mimicry was impaired specifically regarding joyful expressions in schizophrenia, which correlated with blunted affect as measured by the SANS. Dyadic interactions involving persons with schizophrenia were less attracted toward mutual joyful affective states. Only unadjusted for age, in the absence of emotional stimuli from their interaction partner, individuals with schizophrenia showed more angry and sad expressions. These impairments in interaffective processes may contribute to social dysfunction in schizophrenia and provide new avenues for future research.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Facial emotion perception deficits, a possible indicator of illness progression and transdiagnostic phenotype, were examined in high-risk psychosis (CHR) patients through a systematic review and meta-analysis of 35 studies (2567 CHR individuals, 1103 non-transitioned [CHR-NT], 212 transitioned [CHR-T], 512 first-episode psychosis [FEP], and 1936 healthy controls [HC]). CHR showed overall (g = -0.369 [95 % CI, -0.485 to -0.253]) and specific impairments in detecting anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutrality, and sadness compared to HC, except for surprise. FEP revealed a general deficit than CHR (g = -0.378 [95 % CI, -0.509 to -0.247]), and CHR-T displayed more pronounced baseline impairments than CHR-NT (g = -0.217 [95 % CI, -0.365 to -0.068]). FEP only exhibited a poorer ability to perceive fear, but not other individual emotions, compared to CHR. Similar performances in perceiving individual emotions were observed regardless of transition status (CHR-NT and CHR-T). However, literature comparing the perception of individual emotions among FEP, CHR-T, and CHR is limited. This study primarily characterized the general and overall impairments of facial emotion perception in CHR which could predict transition risk, emphasizing the need for future research on multimodal parameters of emotion perception and associations with other psychiatric outcomes.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Affect recognition has emerged as a potential mechanism underlying the social competence challenges experienced by pediatric brain tumour survivors (PBTSs). However, many social interactions were altered during the pandemic, with the widespread use of masking potentially impacting affect recognition abilities. Here, we examine affect recognition in PBTSs and typically developing youth (TD) after the onset of the global pandemic. Twenty-three PBTSs and 24 TD between 8 and 16 years old were recruited and completed two performance-based affect recognition tasks (full and partial facial features) and a self-reported questionnaire on mask exposure in their social interactions. Their parents completed parent proxy questionnaires on their child's social adjustment and sociodemographics. The scores between the PBTSs and TD did not differ significantly in full (t(45) = 1.33, p = 0.19, d = 0.39, 95% CI [-0.69, 3.40]) or partial (t(37.36) = 1.56, p = 0.13, d = 0.46, 95% CI [-0.47, 3.60]) affect recognition, suggesting similar affect recognition between the two groups. These skills were also not significantly correlated with social adjustment or mask exposure (p > 0.05). However, the combined sample had significantly better scores in affect recognition when exposed to partial facial cues versus full. Additionally, participants obtained lower scores on a measure of full facial affect recognition and higher scores on a measure of partial affect recognition compared to pre-pandemic data. The pandemic may have influenced affect recognition across youth, underscoring the importance of further research into its lasting impact on the social competence of youth.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Humans can decode emotional states from the body odors of the conspecifics and this type of emotional communication is particularly relevant in conditions in which social interactions are impaired, as in depression and social anxiety. The present study aimed to explore how body odors collected in happiness and fearful conditions modulate the subjective ratings, the psychophysiological response and the neural processing of neutral faces in individuals with depressive symptoms, social anxiety symptoms, and healthy controls (N = 22 per group). To this aim, electrocardiogram (ECG) and HD-EEG were recorded continuously. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) was extracted from the ECG as a measure of vagal tone, event-related potentials (ERPs) and event-related spectral perturbations (ERPSs) were extracted from the EEG. The results revealed that the HRV increased during the fear and happiness body odors conditions compared to clean air, but no group differences emerged. For ERPs data, repeated measure ANOVA did not show any significant effects. However, the ERPSs analyses revealed a late increase in delta power and a reduced beta power both at an early and a late stage of stimulus processing in response to the neutral faces presented with the emotional body odors, regardless of the presence of depressive or social anxiety symptoms. The current research offers new insights, demonstrating that emotional chemosignals serve as potent environmental cues. This represents a substantial advancement in comprehending the impact of emotional chemosignals in both individuals with and without affective disorders.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Several mental disorders emerge during childhood or adolescence and are often characterized by socioemotional difficulties, including alterations in emotion perception. Emotional facial expressions are processed in discrete functional brain modules whose connectivity patterns encode emotion categories, but the involvement of these neural circuits in psychopathology in youth is poorly understood. This study examined the associations between activation and functional connectivity patterns in emotion circuits and psychopathology during development. We used task-based fMRI data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC, N = 1221, 8-23 years) and conducted generalized psycho-physiological interaction (gPPI) analyses. Measures of psychopathology were derived from an independent component analysis of questionnaire data. The results showed positive associations between identifying fearful, sad, and angry faces and depressive symptoms, and a negative relationship between sadness recognition and positive psychosis symptoms. We found a positive main effect of depressive symptoms on BOLD activation in regions overlapping with the default mode network, while individuals reporting higher levels of norm-violating behavior exhibited emotion-specific lower functional connectivity within regions of the salience network and between modules that overlapped with the salience and default mode network. Our findings illustrate the relevance of functional connectivity patterns underlying emotion processing for behavioral problems in children and adolescents.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

The functional importance of the anterior temporal lobes (ATLs) has come to prominence in two active, albeit unconnected literatures-(i) face recognition and (ii) semantic memory. To generate a unified account of the ATLs, we tested the predictions from each literature and examined the effects of bilateral versus unilateral ATL damage on face recognition, person knowledge, and semantic memory. Sixteen people with bilateral ATL atrophy from semantic dementia (SD), 17 people with unilateral ATL resection for temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE; left = 10, right = 7), and 14 controls completed tasks assessing perceptual face matching, person knowledge and general semantic memory. People with SD were impaired across all semantic tasks, including person knowledge. Despite commensurate total ATL damage, unilateral resection generated mild impairments, with minimal differences between left- and right-ATL resection. Face matching performance was largely preserved but slightly reduced in SD and right TLE. All groups displayed the familiarity effect in face matching; however, it was reduced in SD and right TLE and was aligned with the level of item-specific semantic knowledge in all participants. We propose a neurocognitive framework whereby the ATLs underpin a resilient bilateral representation system that supports semantic memory, person knowledge and face recognition.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Categorical learning is important and often challenging in both specialized domains, such as medical image interpretation, and commonplace ones, such as face recognition. Research has shown that comparing items from different categories can enhance the learning of perceptual classifications, particularly when those categories appear highly similar. Here, we developed and tested novel adaptively triggered comparisons (ATCs), in which errors produced during interactive learning dynamically prompted the presentation of active comparison trials. In a facial identity paradigm, undergraduate participants learned to recognize and name varying views of 22 unknown people. In Experiment 1, single-item classification trials were compared to a condition in which ATC trials were generated whenever a participant repeatedly confused two faces. Comparison trials required discrimination between simultaneously presented exemplars from the confused categories. In Experiment 2, an ATC condition was compared to a non-adaptive comparison condition. Participants learned to accuracy and speed criteria, and completed immediate and delayed posttests. ATCs substantially enhanced learning efficiency in both experiments. These studies, using a novel adaptive procedure guided by each learner's performance, show that adaptively triggered comparisons improve category learning.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

The PI20 is a self-report questionnaire that assesses the presence of lifelong face recognition difficulties. The items on this scale ask respondents to assess their face recognition ability relative to the rest of the population, either explicitly or implicitly. Recent reports suggest that the PI20 scores of autistic participants exhibit little or no correlation with their performance on the Cambridge Face Memory Test-a key measure of face recognition ability. These reports are suggestive of a meta-cognitive deficit whereby autistic individuals are unable to infer whether their face recognition is impaired relative to the wider population. In the present study, however, we observed significant correlations between the PI20 scores of 77 autistic adults and their performance on two variants of the Cambridge Face Memory Test. These findings indicate that autistic individuals can infer whether their face recognition ability is impaired. Consistent with previous research, we observed a wide spread of face recognition abilities within our autistic sample. While some individuals approached ceiling levels of performance, others met the prevailing diagnostic criteria for developmental prosopagnosia. This variability showed little or no association with non-verbal intelligence, autism severity, or the presence of co-occurring alexithymia or ADHD.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Faces and bodies provide critical cues for social interaction and communication. Their structural encoding depends on configural processing, as suggested by the detrimental effect of stimulus inversion for both faces (i.e., face inversion effect - FIE) and bodies (body inversion effect - BIE). An occipito-temporal negative event-related potential (ERP) component peaking around 170 ms after stimulus onset (N170) is consistently elicited by human faces and bodies and is affected by the inversion of these stimuli. Albeit it is known that emotional expressions can boost structural encoding (resulting in larger N170 components for emotional than for neutral faces), little is known about body emotional expressions. Thus, the current study investigated the effects of different emotional expressions on structural encoding in combination with FIE and BIE. Three ERP components (P1, N170, P2) were recorded using a 128-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) when participants were presented with (upright and inverted) faces and bodies conveying four possible emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear) or no emotion (neutral). Results demonstrated that inversion and emotional expressions independently affected the Accuracy and amplitude of all ERP components (P1, N170, P2). In particular, faces showed specific effects of emotional expressions during the structural encoding stage (N170), while P2 amplitude (representing top-down conceptualisation) was modified by emotional body perception. Moreover, the task performed by participants (i.e., implicit vs. explicit processing of emotional information) differently influenced Accuracy and ERP components. These results support integrated theories of visual perception, thus speaking in favour of the functional independence of the two neurocognitive pathways (one for structural encoding and one for emotional expression analysis) involved in social stimuli processing. Results are discussed highlighting the neurocognitive and computational advantages of the independence between the two pathways.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Research suggests various associations between generalized trust and a wide range of economic, political, and social dimensions. Despite its importance, there is considerable debate about how best to measure generalized trust. One recent solution operationalizes generalized trust as the average of trust ratings across a small set of trust domains and human faces. Here, we investigate whether heterogeneity in facial appearance affects the psychometric properties of these new instruments. In a survey experiment conducted with a sample of U.S. adults (n = 5001), we randomly assigned respondents to one of five conditions that varied the features of human and AI-synthesized faces. Irrespective of the condition, respondents rated each face along four trust domains. We find that facial heterogeneity has negligible effects on the measurement validity and measurement equivalence of these new instruments. Small differences are observed on a subset of faces for some psychometric tests. These findings contribute to a growing body of work using faces to measure generalized trust, and demonstrate the utility of using AI-synthesized faces in social science research more broadly.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Visual recognition of three-dimensional signals, such as faces, is challenging because the signals appear different from different viewpoints. A flexible but cognitively challenging solution is viewpoint-independent recognition, where receivers identify signals from novel viewing angles. Here, we used same/different concept learning to test viewpoint-independent face recognition in Polistes fuscatus, a wasp that uses facial patterns to individually identify conspecifics. We found that wasps use extrapolation to identify novel views of conspecific faces. For example, wasps identify a pair of pictures of the same wasp as the 'same', even if the pictures are taken from different views (e.g. one face 0 deg rotation, one face 60 deg rotation). This result is notable because it provides the first evidence of view-invariant recognition via extrapolation in an invertebrate. The results suggest that viewpoint-independent recognition via extrapolation may be a widespread strategy to facilitate individual face recognition.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

While alterations in both physiological responses to others' emotions as well as interoceptive abilities have been identified in autism, their relevance in altered emotion recognition is largely unknown. We here examined the role of interoceptive ability, facial mimicry, and autistic traits in facial emotion processing in non-autistic individuals. In an online Experiment 1, participants (N = 99) performed a facial emotion recognition task, including ratings of perceived emotional intensity and confidence in emotion recognition, and reported on trait interoceptive accuracy, interoceptive sensibility and autistic traits. In a follow-up lab Experiment 2 involving 100 participants, we replicated the online experiment and additionally investigated the relationship between facial mimicry (measured through electromyography), cardiac interoceptive accuracy (evaluated using a heartbeat discrimination task), and autistic traits in relation to emotion processing. Across experiments, neither interoception measures nor facial mimicry accounted for a reduced recognition of specific expressions with higher autistic traits. Higher trait interoceptive accuracy was rather associated with more confidence in correct recognition of some expressions, as well as with higher ratings of their perceived emotional intensity. Exploratory analyses indicated that those higher intensity ratings might result from a stronger integration of instant facial muscle activations, which seem to be less integrated in intensity ratings with higher autistic traits. Future studies should test whether facial muscle activity, and physiological signals in general, are correspondingly less predictive of perceiving emotionality in others in individuals on the autism spectrum, and whether training interoceptive abilities might facilitate the interpretation of emotional expressions.

Asunto(s)