Effects of expectation on face perception and its association with expertise.

Perceptual decisions are derived from the combination of priors and sensorial input. While priors are broadly understood to reflect experience/expertise developed over one's lifetime, the role of perceptual expertise at the individual level has seldom been directly explored. Here, we manipulate probabilistic information associated with a high and low expertise category (faces and cars respectively), while assessing individual level of expertise with each category. 67 participants learned the probabilistic association between a color cue and each target category (face/car) in a behavioural categorization task. Neural activity (EEG) was then recorded in a similar paradigm in the same participants featuring the previously learned contingencies without the explicit task. Behaviourally, perception of the higher expertise category (faces) was modulated by expectation. Specifically, we observed facilitatory and interference effects when targets were correctly or incorrectly expected, which were also associated with independently measured individual levels of face expertise. Multivariate pattern analysis of the EEG signal revealed clear effects of expectation from 100 ms post stimulus, with significant decoding of the neural response to expected vs. not stimuli, when viewing identical images. Latency of peak decoding when participants saw faces was directly associated with individual level facilitation effects in the behavioural task. The current results not only provide time sensitive evidence of expectation effects on early perception but highlight the role of higher-level expertise on forming priors.

Children perceive illusory faces in objects as male more often than female.

Face pareidolia is the experience of seeing illusory faces in inanimate objects. While children experience face pareidolia, it is unknown whether they perceive gender in illusory faces, as their face evaluation system is still developing in the first decade of life. In a sample of 412 children and adults from 4 to 80 years of age we found that like adults, children perceived many illusory faces in objects to have a gender and had a strong bias to see them as male rather than female, regardless of their own gender identification. These results provide evidence that the male bias for face pareidolia emerges early in life, even before the ability to discriminate gender from facial cues alone is fully developed. Further, the existence of a male bias in children suggests that any social context that elicits the cognitive bias to see faces as male has remained relatively consistent across generations.

Face recognition ability is manifest in early dynamic decoding of face-orientation selectivity-Evidence from multi-variate pattern analysis of the neural response.

Although humans are considered to be face experts, there is a well-established reliable variation in the degree to which neurotypical individuals are able to learn and recognise faces. While many behavioural studies have characterised these differences, studies that seek to relate the neuronal response to standardised behavioural measures of ability remain relatively scarce, particularly so for the time-resolved approaches and the early response to face stimuli. In the present study we make use of a relatively recent methodological advance, multi-variate pattern analysis (MVPA), to decode the time course of the neural response to faces compared to other object categories (inverted faces, objects). Importantly, for the first time, we directly relate metrics of this decoding assessed at the individual level to gold-standard measures of behavioural face processing ability assessed in an independent task. Thirty-nine participants completed the behavioural Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT), then viewed images of faces and houses (presented upright and inverted) while their neural activity was measured via electroencephalography. Significant decoding of both face orientation and face category were observed in all individual participants. Decoding of face orientation, a marker of more advanced face processing, was earlier and stronger in participants with higher levels of face expertise, while decoding of face category information was earlier but not stronger for individuals with greater face expertise. Taken together these results provide a marker of significant differences in the early neuronal response to faces from around 100 ms post stimulus as a function of behavioural expertise with faces.

Orientation effects support specialist processing of upright unfamiliar faces in children and adults.

It is considerably harder to generalize identity across different pictures of unfamiliar faces, compared with familiar faces. This finding hints strongly at qualitatively distinct processing of unfamiliar face stimuli-for which we have less expertise. Yet, the extent to which face selective versus generic visual processes drive outcomes during this task has yet to be determined. To explore the relative contributions of each, we contrasted performance on a version of the popular Telling Faces Together unfamiliar face matching task, implemented in both upright and inverted orientations. Furthermore, we included different age groups (132 British children ages 6 to 11 years [69.7% White], plus 37 British White adults) to investigate how participants' experience with faces as a category influences their selective utilization of specialized processes for unfamiliar faces. Results revealed that unfamiliar face matching is highly orientation-selective. Accuracy was higher for upright compared with inverted faces from 6 years of age, which is consistent with selective utilization of specialized processes for upright versus inverted unfamiliar faces during this task. The effect of stimulus orientation did not interact significantly with age, and there was no graded increase in the magnitude of inversion effects observed across childhood. Still, a numerically larger inversion effect in adults compared to children provides a degree of support for developmental changes in these specialized face abilities with increasing age/experience. Differences in the pattern of errors across age groups are also consistent with a qualitative shift in unfamiliar face processing that occurs some time after 11 years of age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Beyond Likert ratings: Improving the robustness of developmental research measurement using best-worst scaling.

Some of the 'best practice' approaches to ensuring reproducibility of research can be difficult to implement in the developmental and clinical domains, where sample sizes and session lengths are constrained by the practicalities of recruitment and testing. For this reason, an important area of improvement to target is the reliability of measurement. Here we demonstrate that best-worst scaling (BWS) provides a superior alternative to Likert ratings for measuring children's subjective impressions. Seventy-three children aged 5-6 years rated the trustworthiness of faces using either Likert ratings or BWS over two sessions. Individual children's ratings in the BWS condition were significantly more consistent from session 1 to session 2 than those in the Likert condition, a finding we also replicate with a large adult sample (N = 72). BWS also produced more reliable ratings at the group level than Likert ratings in the child sample. These findings indicate that BWS is a developmentally appropriate response format that can deliver substantial improvements in reliability of measurement, which can increase our confidence in the robustness of findings with children.

Characterizing the neural signature of face processing in Williams syndrome via multivariate pattern analysis and event related potentials.

Face recognition ability is often reported to be a relative strength in Williams syndrome (WS). Yet methodological issues associated with the supporting research, and evidence that atypical face processing mechanisms may drive outcomes 'in the typical range', challenge these simplistic characterisations of this important social ability. Detailed investigations of face processing abilities in WS both at a behavioural and neural level provide critical insights. Here, we behaviourally characterised face recognition ability in 18 individuals with WS comparatively to typically developing children and adult control groups. A subset of 11 participants with WS as well as chronologically age matched typical adults further took part in an EEG task where they were asked to attentively view a series of upright and inverted faces and houses. State-of-the-art multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) was used alongside standard ERP analysis to obtain a detailed characterisation of the neural profile associated with 1) viewing faces as an overall category (by examining neural activity associated with upright faces and houses), and to 2) the canonical upright configuration of a face, critically associated with expertise in typical development and often linked with holistic processing (upright and inverted faces). Our results show that while face recognition ability is not on average at a chronological age-appropriate level in individuals with WS, it nonetheless appears to be a relative strength within their cognitive profile. Furthermore, all participants with WS revealed a differential pattern of neural activity to faces compared to objects, showing a distinct response to faces as a category, as well as a differential neural pattern for upright vs. inverted faces. Nonetheless, an atypical profile of face orientation classification was found in WS, suggesting that this group differs from typical individuals in their face processing mechanisms. Through this innovative application of MVPA, alongside the high temporal resolution of EEG, we provide important new insights into the neural processing of faces in WS.

Developmental changes in the processing of faces as revealed by EEG decoding.

Rapidly and accurately processing information from faces is a critical human function that is known to improve with developmental age. Understanding the underlying drivers of this improvement remains a contentious question, with debate continuing as to the presence of early vs. late maturation of face-processing mechanisms. Recent behavioural evidence suggests an important 'hallmark' of expert face processing - the face inversion effect - is present in very young children, yet neural support for this remains unclear. To address this, we conducted a detailed investigation of the neural dynamics of face processing in children spanning a range of ages (6-11 years) and adults. Uniquely, we applied multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to the electroencephalogram signal (EEG) to test for the presence of a distinct neural profile associated with canonical upright faces when compared both to other objects (houses) and to inverted faces. Results revealed robust discrimination profiles, at the individual level, of differentiated neural activity associated with broad face categorization and further with its expert processing, as indexed by the face inversion effect, from the youngest ages tested. This result is consistent with an early functional maturation of broad face processing mechanisms. Yet, clear quantitative differences between the response profile of children and adults is suggestive of age-related refinement of this system with developing face and general expertise. Standard ERP analysis also provides some support for qualitative differences in the neural response to inverted faces in children in contrast to adults. This neural profile is in line with recent behavioural studies that have reported impressively expert early face abilities during childhood, while also providing novel evidence of the ongoing neural specialisation between child and adulthood.

Sex-specific variation in facial masculinity/femininity associated with autistic traits in the general population.

Reports linking prenatal testosterone exposure to autistic traits and to a masculinized face structure have motivated research investigating whether autism is associated with facial masculinization. This association has been reported with greater consistency for females than for males, in studies comparing groups with high and low levels of autistic traits. In the present study, we conducted two experiments to examine facial masculinity/femininity in 151 neurotypical adults selected for either low, mid-range, or high levels of autistic traits. In the first experiment, their three-dimensional facial photographs were subjectively rated by 41 raters for masculinity/femininity and were objectively analysed. In the second experiment, we generated 6-face composite images, which were rated by another 36 raters. Across both experiments, findings were consistent for ratings of photographs and composite images. For females, a linear relationship was observed where femininity ratings decreased as a function of higher levels of autistic traits. For males, we found a U-shaped function where males with mid-range levels of traits were rated lowest on masculinity. Objective facial analyses revealed that higher levels of autistic traits were associated with less feminine facial structures in females and less masculine structures in males. These results suggest sex-specific relationships between autistic traits and facial masculinity/femininity.

Appearance-based trust processing in schizophrenia.

OBJECTIVES: Schizophrenia is characterized by impaired social interactions and altered trust. In the general population, trust is often based on facial appearance, with limited validity but enormous social consequences. The aim was to examine trust processing in schizophrenia and specifically to examine how people with schizophrenia use facial appearance as well as actual partner fairness to guide trusting decisions. DESIGN: An experimental economic game study. METHODS: Here, we tested how patients with schizophrenia and control participants (each N = 24) use facial trustworthiness appearance and partner fairness behaviour to guide decisions in a multi-round Trust Game. In the Trust Game, participants lent money to 'partners' whose facial appearance was either untrustworthy or trustworthy, and who either played fairly or unfairly. Clinical symptoms were measured as well as explicit trustworthiness impressions. RESULTS: Overall, the patients with schizophrenia showed unimpaired explicit facial trustworthiness impressions and unimpaired facial appearance biases in the Trust Game. Crucially, patients and controls significantly differed so that the patients with schizophrenia did not learn to discriminate in the Trust Game based on actual partner fairness, unlike control participants. CONCLUSION: A failure to discriminate trust has important implications for everyday functioning in schizophrenia, as forming accurate trustworthiness beliefs is an essential social skill. Critically, without relying on more valid trust cues, people with schizophrenia may be especially susceptible to the misleading effect of appearance when making trusting decisions. PRACTITIONER POINTS: Findings People with schizophrenia made very similar facial trustworthiness impressions to healthy controls and also used facial appearance to guide trust decisions similarly to controls. However, the patient group were less able to explicitly distinguish between fair and unfair partners based on their behaviour compared with the control group. Moreover, people with schizophrenia failed to use actual partner fairness to guide their financial decisions in the Trust Game, unlike controls, and this impairment was specific to a social task. People with schizophrenia may be particularly reliant on facial appearance when trusting others, as they may struggle to incorporate more valid trustworthiness information in their decision-making, such as actual partner fairness.

Children show adult-like facial appearance biases when trusting others.

A large research literature details the powerful behavioral consequences that a trustworthy appearance can have on adult behavior. Surprisingly, few studies have investigated how these biases operate among children, despite the theoretical importance of understanding when these biases emerge in development. Here, we used an economic trust game to systematically investigate trust behavior in young children (5-8 years), older children (9-12 years), and adults. Participants played the game with child and adult "partners" that varied in emotional expression (mild displays of happiness and anger, and a neutral baseline), which is known to modulate perceived trustworthiness. Strikingly, both groups of children showed adult-like facial appearance biases when trusting others, with no "own-age bias." There were no developmental differences in the magnitude of this effect, which supports adult-like overgeneralization of these transient emotion cues into enduring trait impressions that guide interpersonal behavior from as early as 5 years of age. Irrespective of whether or not they were explicitly directed to do so, all participants modulated their behavior in line with the emotion cues: more generous and trusting with happy partners, followed by neutral, and then angry. These findings speak to the impressive sophistication of children's early social cognition and provide key insights into the causal mechanisms driving trait impressions, suggesting they are not necessarily contingent upon protracted social experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The predictive validity of the MoCA-LD for assessing mental capacity in adults with intellectual disabilities.

BACKGROUND: Mental capacity assessments currently rely on subjective opinion. Researchers have yet to explore the association between key cognitive functions of rational decision making and mental capacity classifications for people with intellectual disabilities. METHOD: Sixty-three adults completed the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which yielded estimates of their overall cognitive ability (MoCA-LD) as well as their memory, attention, language and executive functioning. Differences in scores were explored for those who had, and lacked, capacity, and logistic regression was used to test the predictive validity of each measure. RESULTS: There were significant differences between both groups for all measures. Logistic regression identified MoCA-LD as a significant predictor of capacity assessment outcomes. ROC curve analysis provided novel, evidence-based benchmarks to help guide clinical practice based on MoCA-LD scores. CONCLUSION: This study offers a foundation for more objective approaches to mental capacity assessment. This demonstrates that assessments of cognitive ability can yield information that is helpful for mental capacity evaluations.

Should I trust you? Autistic traits predict reduced appearance-based trust decisions.

Facial impressions of trustworthiness guide social decisions in the general population, as shown by financial lending in economic Trust Games. As an exception, autistic boys fail to use facial impressions to guide trust decisions, despite forming typical facial trustworthiness impressions (Autism, 19, 2015a, 1002). Here, we tested whether this dissociation between forming and using facial impressions of trustworthiness extends to neurotypical men with high levels of autistic traits. Forty-six Caucasian men completed a multi-turn Trust Game, a facial trustworthiness impressions task, the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, and two Theory of Mind tasks. As hypothesized, participants' levels of autistic traits had no observed effect on the impressions formed, but negatively predicted the use of those impressions in trust decisions. Thus, the dissociation between forming and using facial impressions of trustworthiness extends to the broader autism phenotype. More broadly, our results identify autistic traits as an important source of individual variation in the use of facial impressions to guide behaviour. Interestingly, failure to use these impressions could potentially represent rational behaviour, given their limited validity.

Transmitting and decoding facial expressions of emotion during healthy aging: More similarities than differences.

Older adults tend to perform more poorly than younger adults on emotional expression identification tasks. The goal of the present study was to test a processing mechanism that might explain these differences in emotion recognition-specifically, age-related variation in the utilization of specific visual cues. Seventeen younger and 17 older adults completed a reverse-correlation emotion categorization task (Bubbles paradigm), consisting of a large number of trials in each of which only part of the visual information used to convey an emotional facial expression was revealed to participants. The task allowed us to pinpoint the visual features each group used systematically to correctly recognize the emotional expressions shown. To address the possibility that faces of different age groups are differently processed by younger and older adults, we included younger, middle-aged, and older adult face models displaying happy, fearful, angry, disgusted, and sad facial expressions. Our results reveal strong similarity in the utilization of visual information by younger and older adult participants in decoding the emotional expressions from faces across ages-particularly for happy and fear emotions. These findings suggest that age-related differences in strategic information use are unlikely to contribute to the decline of facial expression recognition skills observed in later life.

Atypical information-use in children with autism spectrum disorder during judgments of child and adult face identity.

Unusual patterns of fixation behavior in individuals with autism spectrum disorder during face tasks hint at atypical processing strategies that could contribute to diminished face expertise in this group. Here, we use the Bubbles reverse correlation technique to directly examine face-processing strategies during identity judgments in children with and without autism, and typical adults. Results support a qualitative atypicality in autistic face processing. We identify clear differences not only in the specific features relied upon for face judgments, but also more generally in the extent to which they demonstrate a flexible and adaptive profile of information use.

Ensemble coding of faces occurs in children and develops dissociably from coding of individual faces.

Ensemble coding allows adults to access useful information about average properties of groups, sometimes even in the absence of detailed representations of individual group members. This form of coding may emerge early in development with initial reports of ensemble coding for simple properties (size, numerosity) in young children and even infants. Here we demonstrate that ensemble coding of faces, which provides information about average properties of social groups, is already present in 6-8-year-old children. This access to average information increases with age from 6 to 18 years and its development is dissociable from age-related improvements in the coding of individual face identities. This dissociation provides the first direct evidence that distinct processes underlie ensemble and individual coding of face identity, evidence that has been lacking from adult studies. More generally, our results add to the emerging evidence for impressively mature sensitivity to statistical properties of the visual environment in children. They indicate that children have access to gist information about social groups that may facilitate adaptive social behaviour.

A "spoon full of sugar" helps the medicine go down: How a participant friendly version of a psychophysics task significantly improves task engagement, performance and data quality in a typical adult sample.

Few would argue that the unique insights brought by studying the typical and atypical development of psychological processes are essential to building a comprehensive understanding of the brain. Often, however, the associated challenges of working with non-standard adult populations results in the more complex psychophysical paradigms being rejected as too complex. Recently we created a child- (and clinical group) friendly implementation of one such technique - the reverse-correlation Bubbles approach - and noted an associated performance boost in adult participants. Here, we compare the administration of three different versions of this participant-friendly task in the same adult participants to empirically confirm that introducing elements in the experiment with the sole purpose of improving the participant experience, not only boosts the participant's engagement and motivation for the task but results in a significantly improved objective task performance and stronger statistical results.

Facial expression coding in children and adolescents with autism: Reduced adaptability but intact norm-based coding.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can have difficulty recognizing emotional expressions. Here, we asked whether the underlying perceptual coding of expression is disrupted. Typical individuals code expression relative to a perceptual (average) norm that is continuously updated by experience. This adaptability of face-coding mechanisms has been linked to performance on various face tasks. We used an adaptation aftereffect paradigm to characterize expression coding in children and adolescents with autism. We asked whether face expression coding is less adaptable in autism and whether there is any fundamental disruption of norm-based coding. If expression coding is norm-based, then the face aftereffects should increase with adaptor expression strength (distance from the average expression). We observed this pattern in both autistic and typically developing participants, suggesting that norm-based coding is fundamentally intact in autism. Critically, however, expression aftereffects were reduced in the autism group, indicating that expression-coding mechanisms are less readily tuned by experience. Reduced adaptability has also been reported for coding of face identity and gaze direction. Thus, there appears to be a pervasive lack of adaptability in face-coding mechanisms in autism, which could contribute to face processing and broader social difficulties in the disorder.

Distinct profiles of information-use characterize identity judgments in children and low-expertise adults.

Face processing abilities vary across the life span: increasing across childhood and adolescence, peaking around 30 years of age, and then declining. Despite extensive investigation, researchers have yet to identify qualitative changes in face processing during development that can account for the observed improvements on laboratory tests. The current study constituted the first detailed characterization of face processing strategies in a large group of typically developing children and adults (N = 200) using a novel adaptation of the Bubbles reverse correlation technique (Gosselin & Schyns, 2001). Resultant classification images reveal a compelling age-related shift in strategic information use during participants' judgments of face identity. This shift suggests a move from an early reliance upon high spatial frequency details around the mouth, eye-brow and jaw-line in young children (∼8 years) to an increasingly more interlinked approach, focused upon the eye region and the center of the face in older children (∼11 years) and adults. Moreover, we reveal that the early versus late phases of this developmental trajectory correspond with the profiles of information use observed in weak versus strong adult face processors. Together, these results provide intriguing new evidence for an important functional role for strategic information use in the development of face expertise. (PsycINFO Database Record

Understanding Strategic Information Use During Emotional Expression Judgments in Williams Syndrome.

Detailed analysis of expression judgments in Williams syndrome reveals that successful emotion categorization need not reflect "classic" information processing strategies. These individuals draw upon a distinct set of featural details to identify happy and fearful faces that differ from those used by typically developing comparison groups: children and adults. The diagnostic visual information is also notably less interlinked in Williams syndrome, consistent with reports of diminished processing of configural information during face identity judgments. These results prompt reconsideration of typical models of face expertise by revealing that an age-appropriate profile of expression performance can be achieved via alternative routes.

Developmental changes in the critical information used for facial expression processing.

Facial expression recognition skills are known to improve across childhood and adolescence, but the mechanisms driving the development of these important social abilities remain unclear. This study investigates directly whether there are qualitative differences in child and adult processing strategies for these emotional stimuli. With a novel adaptation of the Bubbles reverse-correlation paradigm (Gosselin & Schyns, 2001), we added noise to expressive face stimuli and presented sub-sets of randomly sampled information from each image at different locations and spatial frequency bands across experimental trials. Results from our large developmental sample: 71 young children (6 -9years), 69 older children (10-13years) and 54 adults, uniquely reveal profiles of strategic information-use for categorisations of fear, sadness, happiness and anger at all ages. All three groups relied upon a distinct set of key facial features for each of these expressions, with fine-tuning of this diagnostic information (features and spatial frequency) observed across developmental time. Reported variability in the developmental trajectories for different emotional expressions is consistent with the notion of functional links between the refinement of information-use and processing ability.