scholarly journals Spatially Filtered Emotional Faces Dominate during Binocular Rivalry

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 998
Author(s):  
Maria Teresa Turano ◽  
Fiorenza Giganti ◽  
Gioele Gavazzi ◽  
Simone Lamberto ◽  
Giorgio Gronchi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Binocular Rivalry ◽  
Visual Display ◽  
Emotional Facial Expressions ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Emotional Faces ◽  
Fearful Faces ◽  
Affective Quality ◽  
Spatial Frequencies ◽  
Coarse Information ◽  
First Time

The present investigation explores the role of bottom-up and top-down factors in the recognition of emotional facial expressions during binocular rivalry. We manipulated spatial frequencies (SF) and emotive features and asked subjects to indicate whether the emotional or the neutral expression was dominant during binocular rivalry. Controlling the bottom-up saliency with a computational model, physically comparable happy and fearful faces were presented dichoptically with neutral faces. The results showed the dominance of emotional faces over neutral ones. In particular, happy faces were reported more frequently as the first dominant percept even in the presence of coarse information (at a low SF level: 2–6 cycle/degree). Following current theories of emotion processing, the results provide further support for the influence of positive compared to negative meaning on binocular rivalry and, for the first time, showed that individuals perceive the affective quality of happiness even in the absence of details in the visual display. Furthermore, our findings represent an advance in knowledge regarding the association between the high- and low-level mechanisms behind binocular rivalry.

Feeling without Seeing? Engagement of Ventral, but Not Dorsal, Amygdala during Unaware Exposure to Emotional Faces

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 531-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yulia Lerner ◽  
Neomi Singer ◽  
Tal Gonen ◽  
Yonatan Weintraub ◽  
Oded Cohen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Binocular Rivalry ◽  
Neural Mechanism ◽  
Emotional Content ◽  
Emotional Faces ◽  
Fearful Faces ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Rivalry Condition ◽  
Differential Involvement ◽  
Medial Pfc ◽  
Face Stimuli

The ability to selectively perceive items in the environment may be modulated by the emotional content of those items. The neural mechanism that underlies the privileged processing of emotionally salient content is poorly understood. Here, using fMRI, we investigated this issue via a binocular rivalry procedure when face stimuli depicting fearful or neutral expressions competed for awareness with a house. Results revealed an interesting dissociation in the amygdala during rivalry condition: Whereas its dorsal component exhibited dominant activation to aware fearful faces, a ventral component was more active during the suppression of fearful faces. Moreover, during rivalry, the dorsal and ventral components of the amygdala were coupled with segregated cortical activations in the brainstem and medial PFC, respectively. In summary, this study points to a differential involvement of two clusters within the amygdala and their connected networks in naturally occurring perceptual biases of emotional content in faces.

scholarly journals Psychophysical evidence for distinct contributions in processing low and high spatial frequencies of fearful facial expressions in backward masking task

2012 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-172
Author(s):  
Remigiusz Szczepanowski ◽  
Agata Sobków
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Present Report ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Conscious Awareness ◽  
Backward Masking ◽  
Emotional Faces ◽  
Fearful Faces ◽  
Spatial Frequencies ◽  
Conscious Processing

The present report examined the hypothesis that two distinct visual routes contribute in processing low and high spatial frequencies of fearful facial expressions. Having the participants presented with a backwardly masked task, we analyzed conscious processing of spatial frequency contents of emotional faces according to both objective and subjective taskrelevant criteria. It was shown that fear perception in the presence of the low-frequency faces can be supported by stronger automaticity leading to less false positives. In contrary, the detection of high-frequency fearful faces was more likely supported by conscious awareness leading to more true positives.

scholarly journals Effects of early institutionalization on emotion processing in 12-year-old youth

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 1749-1761 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Bick ◽  
Rhiannon Luyster ◽  
Nathan A. Fox ◽  
Charles H. Zeanah ◽  
Charles A. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Emotion Recognition ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Developmental Trajectories ◽  
Emotion Processing ◽  
Institutional Care ◽  
Facial Emotion Recognition ◽  
Facial Emotion ◽  
Emotional Facial Expressions ◽  
Fearful Faces

AbstractWe examined facial emotion recognition in 12-year-olds in a longitudinally followed sample of children with and without exposure to early life psychosocial deprivation (institutional care). Half of the institutionally reared children were randomized into foster care homes during the first years of life. Facial emotion recognition was examined in a behavioral task using morphed images. This same task had been administered when children were 8 years old. Neutral facial expressions were morphed with happy, sad, angry, and fearful emotional facial expressions, and children were asked to identify the emotion of each face, which varied in intensity. Consistent with our previous report, we show that some areas of emotion processing, involving the recognition of happy and fearful faces, are affected by early deprivation, whereas other areas, involving the recognition of sad and angry faces, appear to be unaffected. We also show that early intervention can have a lasting positive impact, normalizing developmental trajectories of processing negative emotions (fear) into the late childhood/preadolescent period.

scholarly journals Social Information Processing in Substance Use Disorders: Insights From an Emotional Go-Nogo Task

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Bjork ◽  
Lori Keyser-Marcus ◽  
Jasmin Vassileva ◽  
Tatiana Ramey ◽  
David C. Houghton ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Substance Use ◽  
Information Processing ◽  
Social Information Processing ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Opioid Use ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Emotional Faces ◽  
Fearful Faces ◽  
Fearful Face

Positive social connections are crucial for recovery from Substance Use Disorder (SUD). Of interest is understanding potential social information processing (SIP) mediators of this effect. To explore whether persons with different SUD show idiosyncratic biases toward social signals, we administered an emotional go-nogo task (EGNG) to 31 individuals with Cocaine Use Disorder (CoUD), 31 with Cannabis Use Disorder (CaUD), 79 with Opioid Use Disorder (OUD), and 58 controls. Participants were instructed to respond to emotional faces (Fear/Happy) but withhold responses to expressionless faces in two task blocks, with the reverse instruction in the other two blocks. Emotional faces as non-targets elicited more “false alarm” (FA) commission errors as a main effect. Groups did not differ in overall rates of hits (correct responses to target faces), but participants with CaUD and CoUD showed reduced rates of hits (relative to controls) when expressionless faces were targets. OUD participants had worse hit rates [and slower reaction times (RT)] when fearful faces (but not happy faces) were targets. CaUD participants were most affected by instruction effects (respond/“go” vs withhold response/“no-go” to emotional face) on discriminability statistic A. Participants were faster to respond to happy face targets than to expressionless faces. However, this pattern was reversed in fearful face blocks in OUD and CoUD participants. This experiment replicated previous findings of the greater salience of expressive face images, and extends this finding to SUD, where persons with CaUD may show even greater bias toward emotional faces. Conversely, OUD participants showed idiosyncratic behavior in response to fearful faces suggestive of increased attentional disruption by fear. These data suggest a mechanism by which positive social signals may contribute to recovery.

Coarse-to-fine Categorization of Visual Scenes in Scene-selective Cortex

2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (10) ◽  
pp. 2287-2297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benoit Musel ◽  
Louise Kauffmann ◽  
Stephen Ramanoël ◽  
Coralie Giavarini ◽  
Nathalie Guyader ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Retrosplenial Cortex ◽  
Dynamic Scenes ◽  
Spatial Frequencies ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
Outdoor Scenes ◽  
Computational Data ◽  
Cortical Regions ◽  
First Time ◽  
Coarse To Fine

Neurophysiological, behavioral, and computational data indicate that visual analysis may start with the parallel extraction of different elementary attributes at different spatial frequencies and follows a predominantly coarse-to-fine (CtF) processing sequence (low spatial frequencies [LSF] are extracted first, followed by high spatial frequencies [HSF]). Evidence for CtF processing within scene-selective cortical regions is, however, still lacking. In the present fMRI study, we tested whether such processing occurs in three scene-selective cortical regions: the parahippocampal place area (PPA), the retrosplenial cortex, and the occipital place area. Fourteen participants were subjected to functional scans during which they performed a categorization task of indoor versus outdoor scenes using dynamic scene stimuli. Dynamic scenes were composed of six filtered images of the same scene, from LSF to HSF or from HSF to LSF, allowing us to mimic a CtF or the reverse fine-to-coarse (FtC) sequence. Results showed that only the PPA was more activated for CtF than FtC sequences. Equivalent activations were observed for both sequences in the retrosplenial cortex and occipital place area. This study suggests for the first time that CtF sequence processing constitutes the predominant strategy for scene categorization in the PPA.

scholarly journals Abnormal visual representations associated with confusion of perceived facial expression in schizophrenia with social anxiety disorder

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand ◽  
Tania Lecomte ◽  
M. Archibaldo Bravo ◽  
Martin Lepage ◽  
Stéphane Potvin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Anxiety Disorder ◽  
Social Anxiety ◽  
Facial Expression ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Social Anxiety Disorder ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Facial Cues ◽  
Spatial Frequencies ◽  
Coarse Information

Abstract Deficits in social functioning are especially severe amongst schizophrenia individuals with the prevalent comorbidity of social anxiety disorder (SZ&SAD). Yet, the mechanisms underlying the recognition of facial expression of emotions—a hallmark of social cognition—are practically unexplored in SZ&SAD. Here, we aim to reveal the visual representations SZ&SAD (n = 16) and controls (n = 14) rely on for facial expression recognition. We ran a total of 30,000 trials of a facial expression categorization task with Bubbles, a data-driven technique. Results showed that SZ&SAD’s ability to categorize facial expression was impared compared to controls. More severe negative symptoms (flat affect, apathy, reduced social drive) was associated with more impaired emotion recognition ability, and with more biases in attributing neutral affect to faces. Higher social anxiety symptoms, on the other hand, was found to enhance the reaction speed to neutral and angry faces. Most importantly, Bubbles showed that these abnormalities could be explained by inefficient visual representations of emotions: compared to controls, SZ&SAD subjects relied less on fine facial cues (high spatial frequencies) and more on coarse facial cues (low spatial frequencies). SZ&SAD participants also never relied on the eye regions (only on the mouth) to categorize facial expressions. We discuss how possible interactions between early (low sensitivity to coarse information) and late stages of the visual system (overreliance on these coarse features) might disrupt SZ&SAD’s recognition of facial expressions. Our findings offer perceptual mechanisms through which comorbid SZ&SAD impairs crucial aspects of social cognition, as well as functional psychopathology.

The Disruptive Presence of the Namban-jin in Early Modern Japan

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 581-602
Author(s):  
Alexandra Curvelo
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Visual Display ◽  
The South ◽  
Early Modern Japan ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Elites ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
First Time ◽  
Folding Screens

Abstract When the Portuguese arrived in Japan around 1543, it was the first time in the history of the archipelago that Western foreigners had entered the country and settled there. These “barbarians from the south” (namban-jin) were considered strangers and viewed with curiosity and suspicion. In Tokugawa Japan (c. 1615-1868), politically marked by territorial unification and the centralization of power, the image of the Europeans that was created and visually registered on folding screens and lacquer-ware was used as a model to frame this presence by both the Japanese political and economic elites and those considered marginal to the existing social order. Namban art, especially paintings, can be seen as a visual display of Japan’s self-knowledge and its knowledge of distant “neighbours.”

Binocular Rivalry and Immediate Memory

1967 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 224-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Sampson ◽  
J. B. Horrocks
Keyword(s):  
Binocular Rivalry ◽  
Experimental Situation ◽  
Memory Task ◽  
Visual Display ◽  
Cerebral Dominance ◽  
Spatial Cues ◽  
Immediate Memory ◽  
Superior Recall ◽  
The Right

Three experiments examine features of a simple memory task on which right-handed, right eye dominant subjects have been reported to recall digits projected to the right eye more accurately than those projected simultaneously to the left eye. Superior recall by these subjects of information projected to the right eye was observed only when stimuli projected simultaneously to both eyes were seen as overlapped in the binocular percept. Under monocular presentations, accuracy of recall was not related to the eye with which stimuli were viewed. The binocular oveslap condition has a significance other than that of simply increasing the difficulty of identifying the elements in a visual display for there were no differences in accuracy of recall from each eye when overlapped stimuli were viewed monocularly. More accurate recall of right eye information appears to reflect the resolution of a conflict between inputs from each eye. The possible relation of this finding to cerebral dominance is also discussed. Order of recall in these experiments depended mainly on spatial cues provided by the experimental situation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document