识别名人与陌生人面孔的功能磁共振成像

探讨名人与陌生人身份判断的脑功能。6名被试参加实验,运用功能磁共振技术采集数据,AFNI软件进行统计处理。实验结果显示,名人面孔身份识别主要激活了额颞区和梭状回等,陌生人面孔识别主要激活了脑岛和梭状回。实验表明,熟悉名人面孔与陌生人面孔识别有其不同的区域;都有梭状回的视觉加工,但是激活的程度不同。     

Social cognition and the human brain

Humans are exceedingly social animals, but the neural underpinnings of social cognition and behavior are not well understood. Studies in humans and other primates have pointed to several structures that play a key role in guiding social behaviors: the amygdala, ventromedial frontal cortices, and right somatosensory-related cortex, among others. These structures appear to mediate between perceptual representations of socially relevant stimuli, such as the sight of conspecifics, and retrieval of knowledge (or elicitation of behaviors) that such stimuli can trigger. Current debates concern the extent to which social cognition draws upon processing specialized for social information, and the relative contributions made to social cognition by innate and acquired knowledge.     

Is the sunny side up and the dark side down? Effects of stimulus type and valence on a spatial detection task

In verbal communication, affective information is commonly conveyed to others through spatial terms (e.g. in “I am feeling down”, negative affect is associated with a lower spatial location). This study used a target location discrimination task with neutral, positive and negative stimuli (words, facial expressions, and vocalizations) to test the automaticity of the emotion-space association, both in the vertical and horizontal spatial axes. The effects of stimulus type on emotion-space representations were also probed. A congruency effect (reflected in reaction times) was observed in the vertical axis: detection of upper targets preceded by positive stimuli was faster. This effect occurred for all stimulus types, indicating that the emotion-space association is not dependent on sensory modality and on the verbal content of affective stimuli.     

Infants’ scanning of dynamic faces during the first year

This research investigated infants’ scanning of a talking, socially engaging face. Three- to four-month-olds looked equally at the mouth and eyes whereas 9-month-olds attended more to the eyes than mouth. These findings shed light on information infants’ seek from dynamic face stimuli.     

Can holistic processing be learned for inverted faces?

The origin of "special" processing for upright faces has been a matter of ongoing debate. If it is due to generic expertise, as opposed to having some innate component, holistic processing should be learnable for stimuli other than upright faces. Here we assess inverted faces. We trained subjects to discriminate identical twins using up to 1100 exposures to each twin in different poses and images. In the upright orientation, twin discrimination was supported by holistic processing. Removal of a single face feature had no effect on performance, and a composite effect (Young, A. W., Hellawell, D., & Hay, D.C. (1987). Configurational information in face perception. Perception 16 (6), 747-759) was obtained. In the inverted orientation, however, above chance identification ability relied on (a) image specific learning, or (b) tiny local feature differences not noticed in the upright faces. The failure to learn holistic processing for inverted faces indicates that, in contrast to the situation for objects (Tarr, M.J., & Pinker, S. (1989). Mental rotation and orientation-dependence in shape recognition. Cognitive Psychology 21 (2), 233-282), orientation specificity of face processing is highly stable against practice.     

Vigilance for threat: effects of anxiety and defensiveness

Eysenck’s (1997) theory that attentional biases for threat vary as an interactive function of trait anxiety and defensiveness was tested using a visual probe task. Two stimulus exposure conditions were used to explore a secondary issue concerning attentional allocation over time. Results indicated that, among high trait anxious participants, only those with low levels of defensiveness showed vigilance for threatening faces presented for 500 ms. They also showed an attentional preference for neutral faces, relative to happy faces, irrespective of exposure condition. This pattern was reversed in high trait anxious participants with high levels of defensiveness, who showed an attentional bias towards happy faces (relative to neutral faces) under both exposure conditions. The findings are discussed in relation to their implications for (a) the significance of measures of defensiveness for the conceptualization of high trait anxious individuals, and (b) the status of anxiety-related biases at different stages of information processing.