Social touch alters newborn monkey behavior

In humans, infants respond positively to slow, gentle stroking—processed by C-tactile (CT) nerve fibers—by showing reductions in stress and increases in eye contact, smiling, and positive vocalizations. More frequent maternal touch is linked to greater activity and connectivity strength in social brain regions, and increases children’s attention to and learning of faces. It has been theorized that touch may prime children for social interactions and set them on a path towards healthy social cognitive development. However, less is known about the effects of touch on young infants’ psychological development, especially in the newborn period, a highly sensitive period of transition with rapid growth in sensory and social processing. It remains untested whether newborns can distinguish CT-targeted touch from other types of touch, or whether there are benefits of touch for newborns’ social, emotional, or cognitive development. In the present study, we experimentally investigated the acute effects of touch in newborn monkeys, a common model for human social development. Rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), like humans, are highly social, have complex mother-infant interactions with frequent body contact for the first weeks of life, making them an excellent model of infant sociality. Infant monkeys in the present study were reared in a neonatal nursery, enabling control over their early environment, including all caregiver interactions. One-week-old macaque infants (N = 27) participated in three 5-minute counter-balanced caregiver interactions, all with mutual gaze: stroking head and shoulders (CT-targeted touch), stroking palms of hands and soles of feet (Non-CT touch), or no stroking (No-touch). Immediately following the interaction, infants watched social and nonsocial videos and picture arrays including faces and objects, while we tracked their visual attention with remote eye tracking. We found that, during the caregiver interactions, infants behaved differently while being touched compared to the no-touch condition, irrespective of the body part touched. Most notably, in both touch conditions, infants exhibited fewer stress-related behaviors—self-scratching, locomotion, and contact time with a comfort object—compared to when they were not touched. Following CT-targeted touch, infants were faster to orient to the picture arrays compared to the other interaction conditions, suggesting CT-targeted touch may activate or prime infants’ attentional orienting system. In the No-touch condition infants attended longer to the nonsocial compared to the social video, possibly reflecting a baseline preference for nonsocial stimuli. In contrast, in both touch conditions, infants’ looked equally to the social and nonsocial videos, suggesting that touch may influence the types of visual stimuli that hold infants’ attention. Collectively, our results reveal that newborn macaques responded positively to touch, and touch appeared to influence some aspects of their subsequent attention, although we found limited evidence that these effects are mediated by CT fibers. These findings suggest that newborn touch may broadly support infants’ psychological development, and may have early evolutionary roots, shared across primates. This study illustrates the unique insight offered by nonhuman primates for exploring early infant social touch, revealing that touch may positively affect emotional and attentional development as early as the newborn period.     

The Janus of Diversity: May the Ideology of Individual Diversity Rationalize Social Inequalities?

Some popular ideas about diversity today emphasize the uniqueness and potential in each individual and posit that all differences across individuals count the same as long as they are “true to themselves.” These ideas saturate current antidiscrimination discourses, but their impact on what might be perceived as discrimination has hardly been tested empirically. This article argues that the direction of that impact may not be taken for granted and advances two hypotheses. First, individual diversity (ID) ideology may direct attention to the alleged psychological attributes of minority group members, rather than to social inequalities and discrimination. Secondly, ID ideology may direct attention towards discrimination only if the target is seen as “authentically unique” (the prototype of ID). Both hypotheses were tested and supported in two studies addressing Greek participants’ perceptions of immigrant children’s difficulties. Study 2 further controlled for possible mediation effects. The discussion suggests that ID ideology might paradoxically rationalize inequalities and discrimination, as well as implicitly raise elitist expectations from minority group members.     

The Politics of Biometric Standards: The Case of Israel Biometric Project

In 2017, after years of public debate, Israel ratified a national biometric project consisting of two initiatives: issuing of biometric ID cards and passports to all Israeli citizens and establishment of a centralized database for storing their bodily information. Design and implementation of a preceding four-year pilot study were accompanied by extensive standardization. Discourse and standard analyses of 33 official state documents – from legal records to performance reports – published by Israeli authorities during the pilot study, unravel the politics of biometric standards employed as part of this project. Biometric standards were used to establish hierarchies between individuals and groups by defining particular bodies as ‘biometrically ineligible.’ These individuals are mostly members of underprivileged and marginalized social groups. Biometric standards were also constructed discursively as scientific and objective to legitimize such discriminatory treatment. Israeli authorities used standards strategically, both as infrastructural elements and as a discursive means. As infrastructural elements, biometric standards were employed, inter alia, to achieve predetermined results and confirm the project’s success. As a discursive means, Israeli authorities actively adopted a ‘discourse of standardization’ to construct an objective and fair image to the project. Standardization of people – namely, quantification of lives, bodies and experiences – is inherently discriminatory because it necessarily results in the creation of categories and hierarchies between biometrically in/eligible bodies.     

High test-retest reliability of a neural index of rapid automatic discrimination of unfamiliar individual faces

An important aspect of human individual face recognition is the ability to discriminate unfamiliar individual. Since many general processes contribute to explicit behavioural performance in individual face discrimination tasks, isolating a measure of unfamiliar individual face discrimination ability in humans is challenging. In recent years, a fast periodic visual stimulation approach (FPVS) has provided objective (frequency-locked) implicit electrophysiological indices of individual face discrimination that are highly sensitive at the individual level within a few minutes of testing. Here we evaluate the test-retest reliability of this response across scalp electroencephalographic (EEG) recording sessions separated by more than two months, in the same 30 individuals. We found no test-retest difference overall across sessions in terms of amplitude and spatial distribution of the EEG individual face discrimination response. Moreover, with only 4 stimulation sequences corresponding to 4 min of recordings per session, the individual face discrimination response was highly reliable in terms of amplitude, spatial distribution, and shape. Together with previous observations, these results strengthen the diagnostic value of FPVS-EEG as an objective and rapid flag for specific difficulties at individual face recognition in the human population.     

Human faces capture attention and attract first saccades without longer fixation

Human faces attract attention, evidenced by reaction time (RT) advantages over non-face stimuli in visual search tasks. In the current study, participants’ eye movements were tracked during a search task to test how the attentional capture of faces is related to looking behaviour. On each trial, participants were cued with a category name (automobiles, birds, chairs, dogs, faces, bodies, or plants). An array of images, one exemplar from each category, was then presented until participants indicated whether the target matched the cue. Results showed that faces as targets resulted in faster search times and were more likely to capture first fixations. Fixations on faces were also shorter compared to other categories. Faces captured attention, attracting first fixations, and participants appeared to be more fluent at processing faces, resulting in shorter fixations. Reaction time advantages for faces could be due to both attention capture and ultra-rapid processing.     

The effect of educational environment on identity recognition and perceptions of within-person variability

Individuals from small communities show impoverished face recognition relative to those from large communities, suggesting that the number of faces to which one is exposed has a measurable effect on face processing abilities. We sought to extend these findings by examining a second factor that influences the population of faces to which one is exposed during childhood: educational setting. In particular, we examined whether formerly home-schooled participants show reduced performance relative to non-homeschoolers on the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT) and on a sorting task in which participants sort photographs of two unfamiliar identities into piles representing the number of identities they believe are present. On the CFMT, there was no effect of educational setting. However, formerly home-schooled participants showed significant deficits on the sorting task. Such results suggest that reduced exposure to faces early in life as a function of home-schooling may have lasting effects on the face processing system.     

Embracing mental illness: do education and contact make any difference in help-seeking intention among Pakistani students?

Those suffering from mental illness usually fall victim to stigmatization and the resulting discrimination. This study aims at finding out whether students differ in their attitudes based on the courses studied and previous contact with mentally ill. Using purposive sampling technique, 236 students from seven departments of University of Karachi were selected for this study. They were divided into three groups based on their educational background i.e. “psychology group”, “allied group” and “other group”. Community Attitude towards Mental Illness (CAMI) Scale along with a demographics sheet were administered to the participants. Using SPSS version 23, one-way ANOVA was carried out between educational groups and responses of CAMI sub-scales. Results indicated that in comparison to the other two groups, attitudes of psychology students were lower on authoritarianism, social restrictiveness subscales and higher on community mental health ideology subscale. Results are discussed in detail.     

Age slowing down in detection and visual discrimination under varying presentation times

The reaction time has been described as a measure of perception, decision making, and other cognitive processes. The aim of this work is to examine age‐related changes in executive functions in terms of demand load under varying presentation times. Two tasks were employed where a signal detection and a discrimination task were performed by young and older university students. Furthermore, a characterization of the response time distribution by an ex‐Gaussian fit was carried out. The results indicated that the older participants were slower than the younger ones in signal detection and discrimination. Moreover, the differences between both processes for the older participants were higher, and they also showed a higher distribution average except for the lower and higher presentation time. The results suggest a general slowdown in both tasks for age under different presentation times, except for the cases where presentation times were lower and higher. Moreover, if these parameters are understood to be a reflection of executive functions, these findings are consistent with the common view that age‐related cognitive deficits show a decline in this function.     

Active sleep is associated with the face preference in the newborns who familiarized with a responsive face

Aim of this study was to investigate the preferential looking behaviour, subsequent to a familiarization task (8-min) with a previously responsive or motionless face, before and after a sleep cycle. Moreover, the role of the active sleep in memory consolidation of the responsive or motionless faces was explored. Hypotheses were that the newborns undergoing a motionless familiarization will exhibit a novelty effect (preference for the novel face) whereas the newborns undergoing a responsive familiarization will show a familiarity effect (preference for the known face) before and after the sleep cycle; moreover, the amount of active sleep will be associated with the looking time at the known face after a sleep cycle.Forty-five healthy full-term newborns were randomly assigned to two groups (group 1: motionless-familiarization and group 2: responsive-familiarization); in both groups newborns were video-recorded during four post-familiarization face-preference tasks, two of them performed before and two after a sleep cycle.During the pre-sleep-trials, there was not a significant preference for one face in both groups. During the post-sleep trials, the newborns showed a clear preference for the novel face. This effect was more evident in group 1. Only in group 2 there was a significant positive correlation between the active sleep duration and the looking duration at the known-face during the post-sleep trials (r = 0.41; p = 0.040). Multiple regression confirmed that only in the group 2 the total duration of the active sleep was associated with the looking duration at the known-face during the post-sleep trials (Adjusted R² = 0.13; β = 0.41; t = 2.2; p = 0.040).Findings showed that in newborns the face representation can be recalled after a sleep cycle. Moreover, the amount of the active sleep predicted the post-sleep looking toward the known-face only in the newborns who interactively familiarized with the face.