The development of emotion recognition from facial expressions and non‐linguistic vocalizations during childhood

Sensitivity to facial and vocal emotion is fundamental to children's social competence. Previous research has focused on children's facial emotion recognition, and few studies have investigated non‐linguistic vocal emotion processing in childhood. We compared facial and vocal emotion recognition and processing biases in 4‐ to 11‐year‐olds and adults. Eighty‐eight 4‐ to 11‐year‐olds and 21 adults participated. Participants viewed/listened to faces and voices (angry, happy, and sad) at three intensity levels (50%, 75%, and 100%). Non‐linguistic tones were used. For each modality, participants completed an emotion identification task. Accuracy and bias for each emotion and modality were compared across 4‐ to 5‐, 6‐ to 9‐ and 10‐ to 11‐year‐olds and adults. The results showed that children's emotion recognition improved with age; preschoolers were less accurate than other groups. Facial emotion recognition reached adult levels by 11 years, whereas vocal emotion recognition continued to develop in late childhood. Response bias decreased with age. For both modalities, sadness recognition was delayed across development relative to anger and happiness. The results demonstrate that developmental trajectories of emotion processing differ as a function of emotion type and stimulus modality. In addition, vocal emotion processing showed a more protracted developmental trajectory, compared to facial emotion processing. The results have important implications for programmes aiming to improve children's socio‐emotional competence.     

LARES: An AI-based teleassistance system for emergency home monitoring

The latest progresses in medicine are helping people live longer and better. An ageing population is a sign of a developed society with an advanced health care system. Improved life expectancy should be welcomed as a major achievement, but it should not cause a financial or social burden. In this scenario, it is critical to support older and handicap adults to continue living independently and retaining their current lifestyle. New technological advances in Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can facilitate this task.In this direction we present lares, an AI-based system that integrates a (i) WSN for receiving information of the environment and the dependent person, (ii) an autonomous robot able to take decisions based on the received information, and (iii) a Web-based system to provide telecare assistance. lares has been tried in two dependent elderly home environments during several weeks, and the experiments show that is able to detect anomalies and generate alarms in abnormal situations.     

Do time-on-task effects reveal face specificity in object cognition?

ABSTRACT

Multiple experimental, neuropsychological, and individual differences studies indicated that faces are processed (e.g. perceived and memorized) differently from non-face objects. It was suggested that face specificity is a result of configural processing which is different from a rather part-based processing of other objects. In this research, we investigated the specificity of face cognition in terms of processing style. To this aim, we estimated Time-on-Task Effects (ToTEs) that allow inferring the level of automaticity of face and house processing. We collected data from 219 participants by applying four perception and recognition tasks. Generalized linear mixed-effects modelling was used to estimate fixed and random effects. Random slopes were interpreted as individual differences in ToTEs. Findings suggested that in the majority of tasks, face processing was dissociable from the processing of non-face objects. Thereby, these results offer a new perspective on the nature of differences in face and object processing.     

Holistic processing in mother’s face perception for infants

In this study, we created composite faces using mothers’ faces to examine holistic face processing in infants aged 5–8 months. The composite-face effect occurred only in infants aged 7–8 months, suggesting that infants older than 7 months are able to process familiar faces holistically.