Long-term information and distributed neural activation are relevant for the “internal features advantage” in face processing: Electrophysiological and source reconstruction evidence

Track and field throwing performance is determined by a number of biomechanical and biological factors which are affected by long-term training. Although much of the research has focused on the role of biomechanical factors on track and field throwing performance, only a small body of scientific literature has focused on the connection of biological factors with competitive track and field throwing performance. The aim of this review was to accumulate and present the current literature connecting the performance in track and field throwing events with specific biological factors, including the anthropometric characteristics, the body composition, the neural activation, the fiber type composition and the muscle architecture characteristics. While there is little published information to develop statistical results, the results from the current review suggest that major biological determinants of track and field throwing performance are the size of lean body mass, the neural activation of the protagonist muscles during the throw and the percentage of type II muscle fiber cross-sectional area. Long-term training may enhance these biological factors and possibly lead to a higher track and field throwing performance. Consequently, coaches and athletes should aim at monitoring and enhancing these parameters in order to increase track and field throwing performance.

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A cortical route for face-like pattern processing in human newborns

10.1101/414284 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Marco Buiatti ◽

Elisa Di Giorgio ◽

Manuela Piazza ◽

Carlo Polloni ◽

Giuseppe Menna ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Face Processing ◽

Visual Stimulation ◽

Neural Substrates ◽

Large Set ◽

Source Reconstruction ◽

Pattern Processing ◽

Cortical Circuit ◽

Processing Circuit ◽

Limited Duration ◽

Inverted Face

AbstractHumans are endowed with an exceptional ability for detecting faces, a competence that in adults is supported by a set of face-specific cortical patches. Human newborns already shortly after birth preferentially orient to faces even when they are presented in the form of highly schematic geometrical patterns, over perceptually equivalent non-face-like stimuli. The neural substrates underlying this early preference are still largely unexplored. Is the adult face-specific cortical circuit already active at birth, or does its specialization develop slowly as a function of experience and/or maturation? We measured EEG responses in 1-4 days old awake, attentive human newborns to schematic face-like patterns and non-face-like control stimuli, visually presented with a slow oscillatory “peekaboo” dynamics (0.8 Hz) in a frequency-tagging design. Despite the limited duration of newborns’ attention, reliable frequency-tagged responses could be estimated for each stimulus from the peak of the EEG power spectrum at the stimulation frequency. Upright face-like stimuli elicited a significantly stronger frequency-tagged response than inverted face-like controls in a large set of electrodes. Source reconstruction of the underlying cortical activity revealed the recruitment of a partially right-lateralized network comprising lateral occipito-temporal and medial parietal areas largely overlapping with the adult face-processing circuit. This result suggests that the cortical route specialized in face processing is already functional at birth.Significance statementNewborns show a remarkable ability to detect faces even minutes after birth, an ecologically fundamental skill that is instrumental for interacting with their conspecifics. What are the neural bases of this expertise? Using EEG and a slow oscillatory visual stimulation, we identified a reliable response specific to face-like patterns in newborns, which underlying cortical sources largely overlap with the adult face-specific cortical circuit. This suggests that the development of face perception in infants might rely on an early cortical route specialized in face processing already shortly after birth.

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Synaptic Long-Term Potentiation and Depression in the Rat Medial Vestibular Nuclei Depend on Neural Activation of Estrogenic and Androgenic Signals

PLoS ONE ◽

10.1371/journal.pone.0080792 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 8 (11) ◽

pp. e80792 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Mariangela Scarduzio ◽

Roberto Panichi ◽

Vito Enrico Pettorossi ◽

Silvarosa Grassi

Keyword(s):

Vestibular Nuclei ◽

Long Term Potentiation ◽

Neural Activation ◽

Term Potentiation

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Increased neural reactivity to emotional pictures in men with high hair testosterone concentrations

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience ◽

10.1093/scan/nsz067 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 14 (9) ◽

pp. 1009-1016

Author(s):

Sanja Klein ◽

Onno Kruse ◽

Isabell Tapia León ◽

Tobias Stalder ◽

Rudolf Stark ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Emotional Reactivity ◽

Neural Activation ◽

Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽

Resonance Imaging ◽

Testosterone Levels ◽

Passive Viewing ◽

Emotional Pictures ◽

Neural Reactivity ◽

The Brain

Abstract Testosterone has been linked to alterations in the activity of emotion neurocircuitry including amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and insula and diminished functional amygdala/prefrontal coupling. Such associations have only ever been studied using acute measures of testosterone, thus little is known about respective relationships with long-term testosterone secretion. Here, we examine associations between hair testosterone concentration (HTC), an index of long-term cumulative testosterone levels and neural reactivity during an emotional passive viewing task using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Forty-six men viewed negative, positive and neutral pictures in the MRI. HTCs were assessed from 2 cm hair segments. The emotional paradigm elicited neural activation in the amygdala, insula and OFC. HTCs were associated with increased reactivity to negative pictures in the insula and increased reactivity to positive pictures in the OFC. We show an association of long-term testosterone levels with increased emotional reactivity in the brain. These results suggest a heightened emotional vigilance in individuals with high trait testosterone levels.

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Adults’ Markers of Face Processing Are Present at Age 6 and Are Interconnected Along Development

Perception ◽

10.1177/0301006618794943 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 47 (10-11) ◽

pp. 1002-1028 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Elite Mardo ◽

Galia Avidan ◽

Bat-Sheva Hadad

Keyword(s):

Face Recognition ◽

Face Perception ◽

Face Processing ◽

General Factor ◽

Specific Marker ◽

Term Memory ◽

Face Memory ◽

Perceptual Skills ◽

Domain Specific

Recent studies on the development of face processing argue for a late, quantitative, domain-specific development of face processing, and face memory in particular. Most previous findings were based on separately tracking the developmental course of face perception skills, comparing performance across different age groups. Here, we adopted a different approach studying the mechanisms underlying the development of face processing by focusing on how different face skills are interrelated over the years (age 6 to adulthood). Specifically, we examined correlations within and between different categories of tasks: face domain-specific skills involving face recognition based on long-term representations (famous face), and short-term memory retention (Cambridge Face Memory Test), perceptual face-specific marker (inversion effect), global effects in scene perception (global–local task), and the perception of facial expressions. Factor analysis revealed that face identity skills have a similar pattern of interrelations throughout development, identifying two factors: a face domain-specific factor comprising adultlike markers of face processing and a general factor incorporating related, but nonspecific perceptual skills. Domain-specific age-related changes in face recognition entailing short- and long-term retention of face representations were observed, along with mature perceptual face-specific markers and more general perceptual effects predicting face perception skills already at age 6. The results suggest that the domain-specific changes in face processing are unlikely to result from developmental changes in perceptual skills driving face recognition. Instead, development may either involve improvement in the ability to retain face representations in memory or changes in the interactions between the perceptual representations of faces and their representations in long-term memory.

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Cortical route for facelike pattern processing in human newborns

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ◽

10.1073/pnas.1812419116 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 116 (10) ◽

pp. 4625-4630 ◽

Cited By ~ 29

Author(s):

Marco Buiatti ◽

Elisa Di Giorgio ◽

Manuela Piazza ◽

Carlo Polloni ◽

Giuseppe Menna ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Face Processing ◽

Neural Substrates ◽

Large Set ◽

Source Reconstruction ◽

Eeg Power Spectrum ◽

Pattern Processing ◽

Eeg Power ◽

Cortical Circuit ◽

Processing Circuit ◽

Limited Duration

Humans are endowed with an exceptional ability for detecting faces, a competence that, in adults, is supported by a set of face-specific cortical patches. Human newborns, already shortly after birth, preferentially orient to faces, even when they are presented in the form of highly schematic geometrical patterns vs. perceptually equivalent nonfacelike stimuli. The neural substrates underlying this early preference are still largely unexplored. Is the adult face-specific cortical circuit already active at birth, or does its specialization develop slowly as a function of experience and/or maturation? We measured EEG responses in 1- to 4-day-old awake, attentive human newborns to schematic facelike patterns and nonfacelike control stimuli, visually presented with slow oscillatory “peekaboo” dynamics (0.8 Hz) in a frequency-tagging design. Despite the limited duration of newborns’ attention, reliable frequency-tagged responses could be estimated for each stimulus from the peak of the EEG power spectrum at the stimulation frequency. Upright facelike stimuli elicited a significantly stronger frequency-tagged response than inverted facelike controls in a large set of electrodes. Source reconstruction of the underlying cortical activity revealed the recruitment of a partially right-lateralized network comprising lateral occipitotemporal and medial parietal areas overlapping with the adult face-processing circuit. This result suggests that the cortical route specialized in face processing is already functional at birth.

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Mental Mechanisms for Topics Identification

Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience ◽

10.1155/2014/920892 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 2014 ◽

pp. 1-11

Author(s):

Louis Massey

Keyword(s):

Baseline Level ◽

Short Term Memory ◽

Decay Rates ◽

Neural Systems ◽

Long Term Memory ◽

Neural Activation ◽

Main Hypothesis ◽

Term Memory

Topics identification (TI) is the process that consists in determining the main themes present in natural language documents. The current TI modeling paradigm aims at acquiring semantic information from statistic properties of large text datasets. We investigate the mental mechanisms responsible for the identification of topics in a single document given existing knowledge. Our main hypothesis is that topics are the result of accumulated neural activation of loosely organized information stored in long-term memory (LTM). We experimentally tested our hypothesis with a computational model that simulates LTM activation. The model assumes activation decay as an unavoidable phenomenon originating from the bioelectric nature of neural systems. Since decay should negatively affect the quality of topics, the model predicts the presence of short-term memory (STM) to keep the focus of attention on a few words, with the expected outcome of restoring quality to a baseline level. Our experiments measured topics quality of over 300 documents with various decay rates and STM capacity. Our results showed that accumulated activation of loosely organized information was an effective mental computational commodity to identify topics. It was furthermore confirmed that rapid decay is detrimental to topics quality but that limited capacity STM restores quality to a baseline level, even exceeding it slightly.

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The worldwide public impact of identifying super-recognisers for police and business

10.31234/osf.io/2ybau ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Josh P Davis

Keyword(s):

Face Processing ◽

Wide Spectrum ◽

Human Face ◽

Short Term ◽

Human Face Recognition ◽

Face Memory ◽

Face Matching ◽

Recognition Ability ◽

Performance Patterns

Super-recognisers occupy the extreme top end of a wide spectrum of human face recognition ability. Although test scores provide evidence of super-recognisers’ quantitative superiority, their abilities may be driven by qualitatively different cognitive or neurological mechanisms. Some super-recognisers scoring exceptionally highly on multiple short-term face memory tests do not achieve superior performances on measures of simultaneous face matching, long term face memory and/or spotting faces in a crowd. Heterogeneous performance patterns have implications for police, security or business aiming to utilise super-recognisers’ superior skills. Drawing on a global participant base (n ≈ 6,000,000), as well as theory and empirical research, this paper describes the background, development, and employment of tests designed to measure four components of superior face processing to assist in recruitment and deployment decisions.

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Boundary Extension in Face Processing

i-Perception ◽

10.1177/2041669517724808 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 8 (5) ◽

pp. 204166951772480 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Olesya Blazhenkova

Keyword(s):

Face Recognition ◽

Individual Differences ◽

Face Processing ◽

Boundary Extension ◽

Short Term ◽

Term Condition ◽

Face Images ◽

Emotional Ability ◽

And Performance

Boundary extension is a common false memory error, in which people confidently remember seeing a wider angle view of the scene than was viewed. Previous research found that boundary extension is scene-specific and did not examine this phenomenon in nonscenes. The present research explored boundary extension in cropped face images. Participants completed either a short-term or a long-term condition of the task. During the encoding, they observed photographs of faces, cropped either in a forehead or in a chin area, and subsequently performed face recognition through a forced-choice selection. The recognition options represented different degrees of boundary extension and boundary restriction errors. Eye-tracking and performance data were collected. The results demonstrated boundary extension in both memory conditions. Furthermore, previous literature reported the asymmetry in amounts of expansion at different sides of an image. The present work provides the evidence of asymmetry in boundary extension. In the short-term condition, boundary extension errors were more pronounced for forehead, than for chin face areas. Finally, this research examined the relationships between the measures of boundary extension, imagery, and emotion. The results suggest that individual differences in emotional ability and object, but not spatial, imagery could be associated with boundary extension in face processing.

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Serotonergic neurotransmission in emotional processing: New evidence from long-term recreational poly-drug ecstasy use

Journal of Psychopharmacology ◽

10.1177/0269881116662633 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 30 (12) ◽

pp. 1296-1304 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Helle Ruff Laursen ◽

Susanne Henningsson ◽

Julian Macoveanu ◽

Terry L Jernigan ◽

Hartwig R Siebner ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Face Processing ◽

Emotional Processing ◽

Neural Basis ◽

Serotonin Depletion ◽

Serotonergic Neurotransmission ◽

Emotional Face Processing ◽

Amygdala Activity ◽

Angry Face ◽

Emotional Face

The brain’s serotonergic system plays a crucial role in the processing of emotional stimuli, and several studies have shown that a reduced serotonergic neurotransmission is associated with an increase in amygdala activity during emotional face processing. Prolonged recreational use of ecstasy (3,4-methylene-dioxymethamphetamine [MDMA]) induces alterations in serotonergic neurotransmission that are comparable to those observed in a depleted state. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we investigated the responsiveness of the amygdala to emotional face stimuli in recreational ecstasy users as a model of long-term serotonin depletion. Fourteen ecstasy users and 12 non-using controls underwent fMRI to measure the regional neural activity elicited in the amygdala by male or female faces expressing anger, disgust, fear, sadness, or no emotion. During fMRI, participants made a sex judgement on each face stimulus. Positron emission tomography with 11C-DASB was additionally performed to assess serotonin transporter (SERT) binding in the brain. In the ecstasy users, SERT binding correlated negatively with amygdala activity, and accumulated lifetime intake of ecstasy tablets was associated with an increase in amygdala activity during angry face processing. Conversely, time since the last ecstasy intake was associated with a trend toward a decrease in amygdala activity during angry and sad face processing. These results indicate that the effects of long-term serotonin depletion resulting from ecstasy use are dose-dependent, affecting the functional neural basis of emotional face processing.

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