What do infants see in faces? ERP evidence of different roles of eyes and mouth for face perception in 9‐month‐old infants

The study examined whether face‐specific perceptual brain mechanisms in 9‐month‐old infants are differentially sensitive to changes in individual facial features (eyes versus mouth) and whether sensitivity to such changes is related to infants' social and communicative skills. Infants viewed photographs of a smiling unfamiliar female face. On 30% of the trials, either the eyes or the mouth of that face were replaced by corresponding parts from a different female. Visual event‐related potentials were recorded to examine face‐sensitive brain responses. Results revealed that increased competence in expressive communication and interpersonal relationships was associated with a more mature response to faces, as reflected in a larger occipito‐temporal N290 with shorter latency. Both eye‐ and mouth changes were detected, though infants derived different information from these features. Eye changes had a greater impact on the face perception mechanisms and were not correlated with social or communication development, whereas mouth changes had a minimal impact on face processing but were associated with levels of language and communication understanding. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Differences in startle reactivity during the perception of angry and fearful faces

Emotion researchers often categorize angry and fearful face stimuli as "negative" or "threatening". Perception of fear and anger, however, appears to be mediated by dissociable neural circuitries and often elicit distinguishable behavioral responses. The authors sought to elucidate whether viewing anger and fear expressions produce dissociable psychophysiological responses (i.e., the startle reflex). The results of two experiments using different facial stimulus sets (representing anger, fear, neutral, and happy) indicated that viewing anger was associated with a significantly heightened startle response (p < .05) relative to viewing fear, happy, and neutral. This finding suggests that while anger and fear faces convey messages of "threat", their priming effect on startle circuitry differs. Thus, angry expressions, representing viewer-directed threat with an unambiguous source (i.e., the expresser), may more effectively induce a motivational propensity to withdraw or escape. The source of threat is comparatively less clear for fearful faces. The differential effects of these two facial threat signals on the defensive motivational system adds to growing literature highlighting the importance of distinguishing between emotional stimuli of similar valence, along lines of meaning and functional impact.     

Environmental Contributions to Adolescent Delinquency: A Fresh Look at the Shared Environment

Few genetically-informative studies have attempted to explicitly identify the shared environmental (i.e., those environmental influences that contribute to sibling similarity) factors now known to contribute to adolescent delinquency. The current study therefore examined whether the parent-child relationship served as one source of these shared environmental influences. Participants were 610 adoptive and biological families from the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study (SIBS). Parents and adolescents reported on their parent-child conflict and parental involvement with child, and adolescents reported on their own delinquent behaviors. We employed structural equation modeling and supplementary multilevel modeling, finding consistent evidence that the association between delinquency and the parent-child relationship is at least partially shared environmental in origin. Such findings provide an important extension of previous twin studies, as they suggest that passive genotype-environment correlations do not explain earlier findings of shared environmental influences on this association.     

Formal Schooling Influences Two- but Not Three-Dimensional Naming Skills

The modulatory influence of literacy on the cognitive system of the human brain has been indicated in behavioral, neuroanatomic, and functional neuroimaging studies. In this study we explored the functional consequences of formal education and the acquisition of an alphabetic written language on two- and three-dimensional visual naming. The results show that illiterate subjects perform significantly worse on immediate naming of two-dimensional representations of common everyday objects compared to literate subjects, both in terms of accuracy and reaction times. In contrast, there was no significant difference when the subjects named the corresponding real objects. The results suggest that formal education and learning to read and to write modulate the cognitive process involved in processing two- but not three-dimensional representations of common everyday objects. Both the results of the reaction time and the error pattern analyses can be interpreted as indicating that the major influence of literacy affects the visual system or the interaction between the visual and the language systems. We suggest that the visual system in a wide sense and/or the interface between the visual and the language system are differently formatted in literate and illiterate subjects. In other words, we hypothesize that the pattern of interactions in the functional-anatomical networks subserving visual naming, that is, the interactions within and between the visual and language processing networks, differ in literate and illiterate subjects.     

The Relationship Between Creativity and Attention in Adults

Creativity is a valuable attribute that involves the generation of original ideas; attention is a vital function that facilitates information selection. There is some evidence that creative people may have poorer attention and are generally more distracted than others, and this distractibility is thought to enable the production of novel ideas. Previous research has largely supported this relationship between creativity and attention, yet they are both multifaceted constructs that can be measured in numerous ways. Using multiple measures of each construct, the aim of this study was to examine which features of creativity and attention might be related in a group of 100 adults (18–80 years, M = 26.9, SD = 11.5). Figural divergent-thinking (DT) originality was positively related to self-reported concentration; yet no other relationships were found. Results suggest that there is no consistent relationship between creativity and attention, and past studies that linked creativity to attention, having used just one or two measures, may be premature in their conclusions.