Amygdala lesions eliminate viewing preferences for faces in rhesus monkeys

Dispositional negativity, cognition, and anxiety disorders: An integrative translational neuroscience framework

When extreme, anxiety can become debilitating. Anxiety disorders, which often first emerge early in development, are common and challenging to treat, yet the underlying mechanisms have only recently begun to come into focus. Here, we review new insights into the nature and biological bases of dispositional negativity, a fundamental dimension of childhood temperament and adult personality and a prominent risk factor for the development of pediatric and adult anxiety disorders. Converging lines of epidemiological, neurobiological, and mechanistic evidence suggest that dispositional negativity increases the likelihood of psychopathology via specific neurocognitive mechanisms, including attentional biases to threat and deficits in executive control. Collectively, these observations provide an integrative translational framework for understanding the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders in adults and youth and set the stage for developing improved intervention strategies.

What Is a Face? Critical Features for Face Detection

Faces convey very rich information that is critical for intact social interaction. To extract this information efficiently, faces should be easily detected from a complex visual scene. Here, we asked which features are critical for face detection. To answer this question, we presented non-face objects that generate a strong percept of a face (i.e., Pareidolia). One group of participants rated the faceness of this set of inanimate images. A second group rated the presence of a set of 12 local and global facial features. Regression analysis revealed that only the eyes or mouth significantly contributed to faceness scores. We further showed that removing eyes or mouth, but not teeth or ears, significantly reduced faceness scores. These findings show that face detection depends on specific facial features, the eyes and the mouth. This minimal information leads to over-generalization that generates false face percepts but assures that real faces are not missed.

A behavioral face preference deficit in a monkey with an incomplete face patch system

Primates are experts in face perception and naturally show a preference for faces under free-viewing conditions. The primate ventral stream is characterized by a network of face patches that selectively responds to faces, but it remains uncertain how important such parcellation is for face perception. Here we investigated free-viewing behavior in a female monkey who naturally lacks fMRI-defined posterior and middle lateral face patches. We presented a series of content-rich images of scenes that included faces or other objects to that monkey during a free-viewing task and tested a group of 10 control monkeys on the same task for comparison. We found that, compared to controls, the monkey with missing face patches showed a marked reduction of face viewing preference that was most pronounced for the first few fixations. In addition, her gaze fixation patterns were substantially distinct from those of controls, especially for pictures with a face. These data demonstrate an association between the clustering of neurons in face selective patches and a behavioral bias for faces in natural images.

Social Cognition in Down Syndrome: Face Tuning in Face-Like Non-Face Images

Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) are widely believed to possess considerable socialization strengths. However, the findings on social cognition capabilities are controversial. In the present study, we investigated whether individuals with DS exhibit shortage in face tuning, one of the indispensable components of social cognition. For this purpose, we implemented a recently developed Face-n-Food paradigm with food-plate images composed of food ingredients such as fruits and vegetables. The key benefit of such face-like non-face images is that single elements do not facilitate face processing. In a spontaneous recognition task, 25 children with DS aged 9 to 18 years were presented with a set of Face-n-Food images bordering on the Giuseppe Arcimboldo style. The set of images was administered in a predetermined order from the least to most resembling a face. In DS individuals, thresholds for recognition of the Face-n-Food images as a face were drastically higher as compared not only with typically developing controls, but also with individuals with autistic spectrum disorders and Williams-Beuren syndrome. This outcome represents a significant step toward better conceptualization of the visual social world in DS and neurodevelopmental disorders in general.