			Home About us Contact

Face Processing (face + processing)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Psychology	50%

Selected Abstracts

Editorial: Introduction to Special Section on Face Processing

THE JOURNAL OF CHILD PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY AND ALLIED DISCIPLINES, Issue 7 2004
Francesca Happé
No abstract is available for this article. [source]

An ERP Study of Emotional Face Processing in the Adult and Infant Brain

CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 1 2007
Jukka M. Leppänen
To examine the ontogeny of emotional face processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from adults and 7-month-old infants while viewing pictures of fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Face-sensitive ERPs at occipital,temporal scalp regions differentiated between fearful and neutral/happy faces in both adults (N170 was larger for fear) and infants (P400 was larger for fear). Behavioral measures showed no overt attentional bias toward fearful faces in adults, but in infants, the duration of the first fixation was longer for fearful than happy faces. Together, these results suggest that the neural systems underlying the differential processing of fearful and happy/neutral faces are functional early in life, and that affective factors may play an important role in modulating infants' face processing. [source]

Early brain lesions and face-processing development

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOBIOLOGY, Issue 3 2005
Scania de Schonen
Abstract Studies of functional plasticity after pre- or perinatal brain damage can tell us whether the neural substrate normally involved in the development of a given ability is specific and, if so, when it becomes functionally specified and unique. Development of face processing was investigated in 5- to 17-year-old children who had a unilateral brain injury in the pre-, peri-, or postnatal period. In Studies 1 and 2, patients with a posterior injury involving the temporal regions exhibited a face-processing deficit that was independent of their age at test time. Even though differences were observed between the two hemispheres in face processing during infancy as well as in adults in cases of normal development, no clear differences between right and left injury were observed here in face-processing deficit. Poor postlesional face-processing plasticity seems to contrast with results of several studies on speech development after early unilateral injury. If the difference in the time window for postlesional plasticity between these two areas of competency is confirmed, it would suggest that the two kinds of abilities rely on neural cells which are sensitive to different plasticity factors. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 46: 184,208, 2005. [source]

Social interest and the development of cortical face specialization: What autism teaches us about face processing

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOBIOLOGY, Issue 3 2002
David J. Grelotti
Abstract Investigations of face processing in persons with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) inform upon theories of the development of "normal" face processing, and the story that emerges challenges some models of the nature and origin of cortical face specialization. Individuals with an ASD possess deficits in face processing and a lack of a fusiform face area (FFA). Evidence from studies of ASD can be conceptualized best using an expertise framework of face processing rather than models that postulate a face module in the fusiform gyrus. Because persons with an ASD have reduced social interest, they may fail to develop cortical face specialization. Face specialization may develop in normal individuals because they are socially motivated to regard the face, and such motivation promotes expertise for faces. The amygdala is likely the key node in the system that marks objects as emotionally salient and could be crucial to the development of cortical face specialization. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 40: 213,225, 2002. DOI 10.1002/dev.10028 [source]

Alcoholism and Dampened Temporal Limbic Activation to Emotional Faces

ALCOHOLISM, Issue 11 2009
Ksenija Marinkovic
Background:, Excessive chronic drinking is accompanied by a broad spectrum of emotional changes ranging from apathy and emotional flatness to deficits in comprehending emotional information, but their neural bases are poorly understood. Methods:, Emotional abnormalities associated with alcoholism were examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging in abstinent long-term alcoholic men in comparison to healthy demographically matched controls. Participants were presented with emotionally valenced words and photographs of faces during deep (semantic) and shallow (perceptual) encoding tasks followed by recognition. Results:, Overall, faces evoked stronger activation than words, with the expected material-specific laterality (left hemisphere for words, and right for faces) and depth of processing effects. However, whereas control participants showed stronger activation in the amygdala and hippocampus when viewing faces with emotional (relative to neutral) expressions, the alcoholics responded in an undifferentiated manner to all facial expressions. In the alcoholic participants, amygdala activity was inversely correlated with an increase in lateral prefrontal activity as a function of their behavioral deficits. Prefrontal modulation of emotional function as a compensation for the blunted amygdala activity during a socially relevant face appraisal task is in agreement with a distributed network engagement during emotional face processing. Conclusions:, Deficient activation of amygdala and hippocampus may underlie impaired processing of emotional faces associated with long-term alcoholism and may be a part of the wide array of behavioral problems including disinhibition, concurring with previously documented interpersonal difficulties in this population. Furthermore, the results suggest that alcoholics may rely on prefrontal rather than temporal limbic areas in order to compensate for reduced limbic responsivity and to maintain behavioral adequacy when faced with emotionally or socially challenging situations. [source]

Looking for faces: Attention modulates early occipitotemporal object processing

PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY, Issue 3 2004
Andreas Lueschow
Abstract Looking for somebody's face in a crowd is one of the most important examples of visual search. For this goal, attention has to be directed to a well-defined perceptual category. When this categorically selective process starts is, however, still unknown. To this end, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) recorded over right human occipitotemporal cortex to investigate the time course of attentional modulation of perceptual processes elicited by faces and by houses. The first face-distinctive MEG response was observed at 160,170 ms (M170). Nevertheless, attention did not start to modulate face processing before 190 ms. The first house-distinctive MEG activity was also found around 160,170 ms. However, house processing was not modulated by attention before 280 ms (90 ms later than face processing). Further analysis revealed that the attentional modulation of face processing is not due to later, for example, back-propagated activation of the M170 generator. Rather, subsequent stages of occipitotemporal object processing were modulated in a category-specific manner and with preferential access to face processing. [source]