Neurophysiological correlates of face gender processing in humans

Picture a scientist: classification images of scientists are perceived as White, male, and socially inept

Introduction

Stereotypes and biases toward social categories are often reflected in mental representations of faces. The current study used a two-phase reverse correlation procedure to visualize mental representations of the faces of a scientist, a hero, a genius, and a person.

Methods

In the first phase, 20 participants completed four blocks of a two-image forced-choice task. In each block, they selected which face from a pair resembled one of the four categories. The images they selected were averaged to create classification images (CIs), which serve as proxy images for their mental representations of the four categories. In the second phase of the study, 251 naive participants rated the CIs based on various valence and demographic characteristics.

Results

We found that the scientist image was rated predominantly as White and male, which reflects stereotypes about who pursues scientific careers. The scientist image was also rated more negatively than the other CIs on several characteristics, which may indicate negative biases toward scientists as unsociable, poor communicators, and incompetent authority figures, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Discussion

These findings deepen our understanding of how social categories are represented and demonstrate how the CI method can reveal stereotypes and attitudes related to these social categories.

Happy and angry facial expressions are processed independently of task demands and semantic context congruency in the first stages of vision - A mass univariate ERP analysis

Neural decoding of others' facial expressions is critical in social interactions and has been investigated using scalp event related potentials (ERPs). However, the impact of task and emotional context congruency on this neural decoding is unclear. Previous ERP studies employed classic statistical analyses that only focused on specific electrodes and time points, which inflates type I and type II errors. The present study re-analyzed the study by Aguado et al. (2019) using robust data-driven Mass Univariate Statistics across every time point and electrode and rejected trials with early reaction times to rule out motor-related activity on neural recordings. Participants viewed neutral faces paired with negative or positive situational sentences (e.g. "She catches her partner cheating on her with her best friend"), followed by the same individuals' faces expressing happiness or anger, such that the facial expressions were congruent or incongruent with the situation. Participants engaged in two tasks: an emotion discrimination task, and a situation-expression congruency discrimination task. We found significant effects of expression largest during the N170-P2 interval, and effects of congruency and task around an LPP-like component. However, the effect of congruency was significant only in the congruency task, suggesting a limited and task-dependant influence of semantic context. Importantly, emotion did not interact with any factor neurally, suggesting facial expressions were decoded automatically during the first 400 ms of vision, regardless of context congruency or task demands. The results and their discrepancies with the original findings are discussed in the context of ERP statistics and the replication crisis.

Arousal responses to personal space intrusions in psychotic illness: A virtual reality study

BACKGROUND

Prior studies have found that individuals with schizophrenia often have an enlarged "personal space". However, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying this consistent finding remain unknown.

METHODS

The well-validated Stop Distance Procedure was used to measure the personal space preferences of individuals with psychotic disorders (PD, N = 22) and demographically-matched healthy controls (HC, N = 20) in response to human and virtual (avatar) intruders. Physiological arousal and subjective discomfort were measured during intrusions into personal space and modeled across different interpersonal distances. Additionally, participants were interviewed to assess their subjective awareness of their personal space preferences.

RESULTS

Personal space measurements with humans and avatars were highly correlated and reliable over repeated trials, and influenced by the displayed emotion and gender of the intruders, in both groups. The PD group exhibited a larger personal space than the HC group (all p < 0.028), and the size of personal space with avatar intruders was significantly correlated with positive symptom severity in the PD subjects. Moreover, the magnitude of arousal responses to personal space intrusions was proportional to a power (exponent) of the distance between subjects and intruders, with a significantly smaller exponent in the PD (compared to the HC) for both human (p = 0.026) and avatar (p = 0.011) intruders, indicating a less steep function. Lastly, much of the participants' qualitative impressions of their personal space behaviors were consistent or correlated with the quantitative findings, reflecting some awareness of the determinants of personal space.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings reveal both intact and altered aspects of personal space regulation in psychotic disorders, and the potential utility of personal space measurements, given their high reliability, to serve as objective targets of interventions.

How does contextual information affect aesthetic appreciation and gaze behavior in figurative and abstract artwork?

Numerous studies have investigated how providing contextual information with artwork influences gaze behavior, yet the evidence that contextually triggered changes in oculomotor behavior when exploring artworks may be linked to changes in aesthetic experience remains mixed. The aim of this study was to investigate how three levels of contextual information influenced people's aesthetic appreciation and visual exploration of both abstract and figurative art. Participants were presented with an artwork and one of three contextual information levels: a title, title plus information on the aesthetic design of the piece, or title plus information about the semantic meaning of the piece. We measured participants liking, interest and understanding of artworks and recorded exploration duration, fixation count and fixation duration on regions of interest for each piece. Contextual information produced greater aesthetic appreciation and more visual exploration in abstract artworks. In contrast, figurative artworks were highly dependent on liking preferences and less affected by contextual information. Our results suggest that the effect of contextual information on aesthetic ratings arises from an elaboration effect, such that the viewer aesthetic experience is enhanced by additional information, but only when the meaning of an artwork is not obvious.

Social and perceptual decisions predict differences in face inversion neural correlates: Implications for development and face perception methods

Social attention, an important mechanism that orients people to social cues, is critical for the development of higher-ordered features of social cognition. Both endogenous (i.e. automatic and undirected) and exogenous (i.e. purposeful and directed) social attention is important for processing social features, yet there is limited work systematically addressing how different experimental manipulations modulate social attention. This study examined how endogenous and exogenous manipulations of a classic face inversion task influence ERP activity in adults (n = 71) and adolescent youth (n = 65). Results from Study 1 indicated a lack of task differences for P1 and N170 but a larger inversion effect for P3 when a social perceptual decision was required. Study 2 demonstrated developmental differences in the youth, such that youth and adults had opposite inversion effects for N170 and youth had no effect for the P3. These findings indicate that face perception neural markers are sensitive to exogenous decisions, with development still active in adolescence. This is important to consider when designing future studies, as task-based decisions may alter the neural responses to faces differentially by age.

You're Beautiful When You Smile: Event-Related Brain Potential (ERP) Evidence of Early Opposite-Gender Bias in Happy Faces

Studies of social cognition have shown gender differences regarding human face processing. One interesting finding is the enhanced processing of opposite-gender faces at different time stages, as revealed by event-related brain potentials. Crucially, from an evolutionary perspective, such a bias might interact with the emotional expression of the face. To investigate this, 100 participants (50 female, 50 male) completed an expression-detection task while their EEG was recorded. In three blocks, fearful, happy and neutral faces (female and male) were randomly presented, with participants instructed to respond to only one predefined target expression level in each block. Using linear mixed models, we observed both faster reaction times as well as larger P1 and late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes for women compared to men, supporting a generally greater female interest in faces. Highly interestingly, the analysis revealed an opposite-gender bias at P1 for happy target faces. This suggests that participants' attentional templates may include more opposite-gender facial features when selectively attending to happy faces. While N170 was influenced by neither the face nor the participant gender, LPP was modulated by the face gender and specific combinations of the target status, face gender and expression, which is interpreted in the context of gender-emotion stereotypes. Future research should further investigate this expression and attention dependency of early opposite-gender biases.

Religious labels and food preferences, but not country of origin, support opposing face aftereffects

Face templates can be experimentally manipulated, and category-contingent aftereffects suggest discrete templates across social groups. We tested whether 1) explicit religious labels, 2) food preferences, and 3) country of origin would support religion-contingent aftereffects across Christians and Muslims face sets. While viewing face images, ninety-three participants heard audio that stated either 1) a character's religious identity, 2) preferred food, or 3) country of origin. Participants viewed contracted Christian faces and expanded Muslim faces during the training phase. To measure adaptation, before and after the training phases, participants selected the face out of a pair of expanded and contracted Christian or Muslim faces that they found more attractive. Contingent aftereffects were found in the religious explicit (t(30) = 2.49, p = 0.02, Cohen's d = 0.58) and food conditions (t(30) = -3.77, p < 0.01, Cohen's d = -0.82), but not the country condition (t(30) = 1.64, p = 0.11, Cohen's d = 0.31). This suggests that religious labels and food preferences create socially meaningful groups, but country of origin does not. This is evidence of an impact of social categorization on visual processing.

Shortcomings of transgender identity concealment research: a scoping review of associations with mental health

Background

Empirical research indicates that high rates of mental health issues in members of marginalised population groups are predicted in part by their decisions to disclose or conceal their stigmatized identities from others-a field of study known as outness research. Transgender outness research is a nascent branch of this field. It reflects neither the multidimensional view of disclosure and concealment adopted in other branches, nor the ability to address unique aspects of trans outness, such as the practical challenges of concealment and the difference between concealing one's gender identity and concealing one's assigned sex. Consequently, prior literature may not accurately represent the effects of transgender identity disclosure and concealment.

Methods

This scoping review explores the theoretical and operational definitions of trans disclosure and concealment in 46 English-language papers, identified from extensive database searches, addressing relationships between these concepts and mental health factors.

Results

Findings indicate that the issues outlined above remain unresolved, even in the widely-used nondisclosure subscale of the Gender Minority Stress and Resilience Measure, and are rarely recognized as a potential source of error. Although small detrimental effects of concealment and beneficial effects of disclosure on mental health were reported in the reviewed studies, reliable conclusions about these relationships and their importance to health and safety in the trans community cannot be drawn while these shortcomings are overlooked.

Conclusion

We encourage researchers to address these neglected areas, reevaluate the language used in measurement questions, and conduct longitudinal research to support an accurate understanding of trans outness phenomena.

P1, N170, and N250 Event-related Potential Components Reflect Temporal Perception Processing in Face and Body Personal Identification

Human faces and bodies represent various socially important signals. Although adults encounter numerous new people in daily life, they can recognize hundreds to thousands of different individuals. However, the neural mechanisms that differentiate one person from another person are unclear. This study aimed to clarify the temporal dynamics of the cognitive processes of face and body personal identification using face-sensitive ERP components (P1, N170, and N250). The present study performed three blocks (face-face, face-body, and body-body) of different ERP adaptation paradigms. Furthermore, in the above three blocks, ERP components were used to compare brain biomarkers under three conditions (same person, different person of the same sex, and different person of the opposite sex). The results showed that the P1 amplitude for the face-face block was significantly greater than that for the body-body block, that the N170 amplitude for a different person of the same sex condition was greater than that for the same person condition in the right hemisphere only, and that the N250 amplitude gradually increased as the degree of face and body sex-social categorization grew closer (i.e., same person condition > different person of the same sex condition > different person of the opposite sex condition). These results suggest that early processing of the face and body processes the face and body separately and that structural encoding and personal identification of the face and body process the face and body collaboratively.

Face processing and early event-related potentials: replications and novel findings

This research explores early Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) sensitivity to facial stimuli, investigating various facial features aimed to unveil underlying neural mechanisms. Two experiments, each involving 15 undergraduate students, utilized a multidimensional stimulus set incorporating race, gender, age, emotional expression, face masks, and stimulus orientation. Findings highlight significant modulations in N170 and P200 amplitudes and latencies for specific attributes, replicating prior research and revealing novel insights. Notably, age-related facial feature variations, facial inversion, and the presence of face masks significantly impact neural responses. Several speculative explanations are proposed to elucidate these results: First, the findings lend support to the idea that the increased N170 amplitude observed with facial inversion is closely tied to the activation of object-sensitive neurons. This is further bolstered by a similar amplitude increase noted when masks (effective objects) are added to faces. Second, the absence of an additional amplitude increase, when inverting face images with face masks suggests that neural populations may have reached a saturation point, limiting further enhancement. Third, the study reveals that the latency deficit in N170 induced by facial inversion is even more pronounced in the subsequent ERP component, the P200, indicating that face inversion may impact multiple stages of face processing. Lastly, the significant increase in P200 amplitude, typically associated with face typicality, for masked faces in this study aligns with previous research that demonstrated elevated P200 amplitudes for scrambled faces. This suggests that obscured faces may be processed as typical, potentially representing a default state in face processing.

Face-evoked thoughts

The thoughts that come to mind when viewing a face depend partly on the face and partly on the viewer. This basic interaction raises the question of how much common ground there is in face-evoked thoughts, and how this compares to viewers' expectations. Previous analyses have focused on early perceptual stages of face processing. Here we take a more expansive approach that encompasses later associative stages. In Experiment 1 (free association), participants exhibited strong egocentric bias, greatly overestimating the extent to which other people's thoughts resembled their own. In Experiment 2, we show that viewers' familiarity with a face can be decoded from their face-evoked thoughts. In Experiment 3 (person association), participants reported who came to mind when viewing a face-a task that emphasises connections in a social network rather than nodes. Here again, viewers' estimates of common ground exceeded actual common ground by a large margin. We assume that a face elicits much the same thoughts in other people as it does in us, but that is a mistake. In this respect, we are more isolated than we think.

Older and Younger Adults Perform Similarly in an Iterated Trust Game

In social contexts, aging is typically associated with a greater reliance on heuristics, such as categorical information and stereotypes. The present research examines younger and older adults’ use of individuating and age-based categorical information when gauging whether or not to trust unfamiliar targets. In an adaptation of the iterated Trust Game, participants had to predict the cooperative tendencies of their partners to earn economic rewards in first encounters – in a context in which they knew nothing about their partners, and across repeated interactions – in a context in which they could learn the individual cooperative tendency of each partner. In line with previous research, we expected all participants to rely on stereotypes in first encounters, and progressively learn to disregard stereotypes to focus on individuating behavioral cues across repeated interactions. Moreover, we expected older participants to rely more on social categories than younger participants. Our results indicate that overall, both the elderly and the young adopted an individuating approach to predict the cooperative behaviors of their partners across trials. However, older adults more consistently relied on gender (but not age) stereotypes to make cooperation decisions at zero acquaintance. The impact of context, motivation, and relevance of categorical information in impression formation is discussed.

Neural and Linguistic Considerations for Assessing Moral Intuitions Using Text-Based Stimuli

This review takes a focused look at neural and linguistic considerations for assessing moral intuitions using text-based stimuli. Relevant neural correlates of moral salience, emotional processing, moral emotions (shame and guilt), semantic processing, implicit stereotype activation (e.g., gender, age, and race stereotypes), and functional brain network development (the default mode network and salience network) are considered insofar as they relate to unique considerations for text-based instruments. What emerge are not only key considerations for researchers assessing moral intuitions using text-based stimuli but also considerations for the study of moral psychology more broadly, especially in developmental and educational contexts.

Convergent evidence for a theory of rapid, automatic, and accurate sex ratio tracking

It is presumed that people track the sex ratios in their environment (the number of males relative to number of females) in order to adaptively adjust their decisions and behaviors, but this actual tracking ability has not been established. The relevance of sex ratio information, drawn from evolutionary biology and studies of human relationship decision making, is integrated here with memory research (on frequency encoding), perception research (on ensemble coding), and neuroscience research. A series of four experiments provide empirical results to help fill research gaps and facilitate this theoretical integration. In particular, these studies connect details from memory research on relatively automatic frequency encoding of both items and categories, perception research on summary statistics from ensemble coding, and theoretical ideas about the function of these abilities (specifically applied to human sex ratios based on faces) from social and evolutionary approaches. Collectively this research demonstrates an evolved psychological mechanism for functional, fast, and relatively automatic human abilities to track experienced sex ratios in the social world. This sex ratio information is theorized to underpin documented facultative adjustments in relationship dynamics as well as perceptions of social group characteristics. This integrative approach highlights how the coding, memory, and judgments about population sex ratios can both account for a number of existing findings and point towards key further research.

Flexing Gender Perception: Brain Potentials Reveal the Cognitive Permeability of Grammatical Information

A growing body of recent research suggests that verbal categories, particularly labels, impact categorization and perception. These findings are commonly interpreted as demonstrating the involvement of language on cognition; however, whether these assumptions hold true for grammatical structures has yet to be investigated. In the present study, we investigated the extent to which linguistic information, namely, grammatical gender categories, structures cognition to subsequently influence categorical judgments and perception. In a nonverbal categorization task, French-English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers made gender-associated judgments about a set of image pairs while event-related potentials were recorded. The image sets were composed of an object paired with either a female or male face, wherein the object was manipulated for their conceptual gender relatedness and grammatical gender congruency to the sex of the following target face. The results showed that grammatical gender modulated the N1 and P2/VPP, as well as the N300 exclusively for the French-English bilinguals, indicating the inclusion of language in the mechanisms associated with attentional bias and categorization. In contrast, conceptual gender information impacted the monolingual English speakers in the later N300 time window given the absence of a comparable grammatical feature. Such effects of grammatical categories in the early perceptual stream have not been found before, and further provide grounds to suggest that language shapes perception.

Event-Related Potential to Conscious and Nonconscious Emotional Face Perception in Females with Autistic-Like Traits

This study explored the electrocortical correlates of conscious and nonconscious perceptions of emotionally laden faces in neurotypical adult women with varying levels of autistic-like traits (Autism Spectrum Quotient—AQ). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during the viewing of backward-masked images for happy, neutral, and sad faces presented either below (16 ms—subliminal) or above the level of visual conscious awareness (167 ms—supraliminal). Sad compared to happy faces elicited larger frontal-central N1, N2, and occipital P3 waves. We observed larger N1 amplitudes to sad faces than to happy and neutral faces in High-AQ (but not Low-AQ) scorers. Additionally, High-AQ scorers had a relatively larger P3 at the occipital region to sad faces. Regardless of the AQ score, subliminal perceived emotional faces elicited shorter N1, N2, and P3 latencies than supraliminal faces. Happy and sad faces had shorter N170 latency in the supraliminal than subliminal condition. High-AQ participants had a longer N1 latency over the occipital region than Low-AQ ones. In Low-AQ individuals (but not in High-AQ ones), emotional recognition with female faces produced a longer N170 latency than with male faces. N4 latency was shorter to female faces than male faces. These findings are discussed in view of their clinical implications and extension to autism.

An ecological measure of rapid and automatic face-sex categorization

Sex categorization is essential for mate choice and social interactions in many animal species. In humans, sex categorization is readily performed from the face. However, clear neural markers of face-sex categorization, i.e., common responses to widely variable individuals from one sex, have not been identified so far in humans. To isolate a direct signature of rapid and automatic face-sex categorization generalized across a wide range of variable exemplars, we recorded scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) from 32 participants (16 females) while they were exposed to variable natural face images from one sex alternating at a rapid rate of 6 Hz (i.e., 6 images per second). Images from the other sex were inserted every 6th stimulus (i.e., at a 1-Hz rate). A robust categorization response to both sex contrasts emerged at 1 Hz and harmonics in the EEG frequency spectrum over the occipito-temporal cortex of most participants. The response was larger for female faces presented among male faces than the reverse, suggesting that the two sex categories are not equally homogenous. This asymmetrical response pattern disappeared for upside-down faces, ruling out the contribution of low-level physical variability across images. Overall, these observations demonstrate that sex categorization occurs automatically after a single glance at natural face images and can be objectively isolated and quantified in the human brain within a few minutes.

Social categorization modulates own-age bias in face recognition and ERP correlates of face processing

The aim of the present study was to further understanding of how social categorization influences face recognition. According to the categorization-individuation model, face recognition can either be biased toward categorization or individuation. We hypothesized that the face recognition bias associated with a social category (e.g., the own-age bias) would be larger when faces were initially categorized according to that category. To examine this hypothesis, young adults (N = 63) completed a face recognition task after either making age or sex judgments while encoding child and adult faces. Young adults showed the own-age and own-sex biases in face recognition. Consistent with our hypothesis, the magnitude of the own-age bias in face recognition was larger when individuals made age, rather than sex, judgments at encoding. To probe the mechanisms underlying this effect, we examined ERP responses to child and adult faces across the social categorization conditions. Neither the P1 nor the N170 ERP components were modulated by the social categorization task or the social category membership of the face. However, the P2, which is associated with second-order configural processing, was larger to adult faces than child faces only in the age categorization condition. The N250, which is associated with individuation, was larger (i.e., more negative) to adult than child faces and during age categorization than sex categorization. These results are interpreted within the context of the categorization-individuation model and current research on biases in face recognition.

Gender identity relevance predicts preferential neural processing of same-gendered faces

The very early perceptional processes that underlie social categorization can be detected with event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Using this methodology, the present work aims to detect differential attentional processing of ingroup and outgroup members based on gender categories. Specifically, three EEG studies tested how factors that enhance social identity relevance, namely gender identification and contextual salience of gender representation, moderate neural gender categorization effects. Study 1 showed that both women (Study 1a) and men (Study 1b) were more likely to show preferential attention to ingroup over outgroup members, but only when they identified strongly with their gender group. Study 2 showed that when gender categories in an intergroup leadership context were made salient (i.e., when women were numerically underrepresented versus equally represented compared to men), women, irrespective of their level of gender identification, showed preferential attention to ingroup over outgroup members. Together, this work provides empirical evidence for (1) the neural gender categorization effect among both men and women as soon as 100 ms after face perception and (2) the moderating role of factors that enhance social identity relevance in early gender categorization.

Facial expressions can inhibit the activation of gender stereotypes

Using faces as the priming stimuli, the present study explored the influence of facial expressions on the activation of gender stereotypes using a lexical decision paradigm. Experiment 1 explored the activation of gender stereotypes when the facial primes contained only gender information. The results showed that gender stereotypes were activated. In Experiment 2, the facial primes contained both gender category and expression information. The results indicated that gender stereotypes were not activated. Experiment 3 required the participants to make emotion, gender, or impression decisions concerning the facial primes before the lexical decision task. The results showed that gender stereotypes were not activated in emotion and impression decisions conditions, whereas stereotypes were activated in gender decisions condition. These finding suggest that facial expressions can inhibit automatic activation of gender stereotypes, unless the perceivers perform gender categorization processing to prime faces intentionally.

Temporal dynamics of access to amodal representations of category-level conceptual information

Categories describe semantic divisions between classes of objects and category-based models are widely used for investigation of the conceptual system. One critical issue in this endeavour is the isolation of conceptual from perceptual contributions to category-differences. An unambiguous way to address this confound is combining multiple input-modalities. To this end, we showed participants person/place stimuli using name and picture modalities. Using multivariate methods, we searched for category-sensitive neural patterns shared across input-modalities and thus independent from perceptual properties. The millisecond temporal resolution of magnetoencephalography (MEG) allowed us to consider the precise timing of conceptual access and, by confronting latencies between the two modalities ("time generalization"), how latencies of processing depends on the input-modality. Our results identified category-sensitive conceptual representations common between modalities at three stages and that conceptual access for words was delayed by about 90 msec with respect to pictures. We also show that for pictures, the first conceptual pattern of activity (shared between both words and pictures) occurs as early as 110 msec. Collectively, our results indicated that conceptual access at the category-level is a multistage process and that different delays in access across these two input-modalities determine when these representations are activated.

Rapid and specific processing of person-related information in human anterior temporal lobe

The anterior temporal lobe (ATL), located at the tip of the human temporal lobes, has been heavily implicated in semantic processing by neuropsychological and functional imaging studies. These techniques have revealed a hemispheric specialization of ATL, but little about the time scale on which it operates. Here we show that ATL is specifically activated in intracerebral recordings when subjects discriminate the gender of an actor presented in a static frame followed by a video. ATL recording sites respond briefly (100 ms duration) to the visual static presentation of an actor in a task-, but not in a stimulus-duration-dependent way. Their response latencies correlate with subjects' reaction times, as do their activity levels, but oppositely in the two hemispheres operating in a push-pull fashion. Comparison of ATL time courses with those of more posterior, less specific regions emphasizes the role of inhibitory operations sculpting the fast ATL responses underlying semantic processing.

How occupational status influences the processing of faces: An EEG study

This study examines the influence of social hierarchy on the neural electrophysiological responses to faces. In contrast with earlier EEG studies that typically manipulate social rank through competitive situations, we implemented hierarchy through occupational status and thus contrasted faces associated with high- vs. low-status (e.g. lawyer vs. waiter). Since social hierarchies are largely intertwined with gender, both female and male faces were used as stimuli, and both female and male participants were tested. The procedure consisted in presenting a status label before the face it was associated with. The analyses focused mainly on two components that have been shown to be modulated by competitive hierarchies and other social contexts, namely the N170 and the Late Positive Potential (LPP). The results indicated that gender, but not status, modulated the N170 amplitude. Moreover, high-status faces elicited larger LPP amplitude than low-status faces but this difference was driven by female participants. This gender effect is discussed in line with research showing that women and men are sensitive to different kinds of hierarchy. Methodological differences are considered to account for the discrepancy between studies that find an effect of hierarchy on the N170 and those that do not.

Same-gender distractors are not so easy to reject: ERP evidence of gender categorization

Social categorization appears to be an automatic process that occurs during person perception. Understanding social categorization better is important because mere categorization can lead to stereotype activation and, in turn, to discrimination. In the present study we used a novel approach to examine event-related potentials (ERPs) of gender categorization in the “Who said what?” memory paradigm, thus allowing for a more in-depth understanding of the specific mechanisms underlying identity versus categorization processing. After observing video clips showing a “discussion” among female and male targets, participants were shown individual statements, each accompanied by one of the discussants’ faces. While we measured ERPs, participants had to decide whether or not a given statement had previously been made by the person with the accompanying face. In same-person trials, statements were paired with the correct person, whereas in the distractor trials, either a same-gender or a different-gender distractor was shown. As expected, participants were able to reject different-gender distractors faster than same-gender distractors, and they were more likely to falsely choose yes for a same-gender than for a different-gender distractor. Both findings indicate gender-based categorization. ERPs, analyzed in a 300- to 400-ms time window at occipito-temporal channels, indicated more negative amplitudes for yes responses both for the same person and for same-gender distractors, relative to different-gender distractors. Overall, these results show gender-based categorization even when the task was to assess the identifying information in a gender-neutral context. These findings are interpreted as showing that gender categorization occurs automatically during person perception, but later than race- or age-based categorization.

Using an emotional saccade task to characterize executive functioning and emotion processing in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and bipolar disorder

Despite distinct diagnostic criteria, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and bipolar disorder (BD) share cognitive and emotion processing deficits that complicate diagnoses. The goal of this study was to use an emotional saccade task to characterize executive functioning and emotion processing in adult ADHD and BD. Participants (21 control, 20 ADHD, 20 BD) performed an interleaved pro/antisaccade task (look toward vs. look away from a visual target, respectively) in which the sex of emotional face stimuli acted as the cue to perform either the pro- or antisaccade. Both patient groups made more direction (erroneous prosaccades on antisaccade trials) and anticipatory (saccades made before cue processing) errors than controls. Controls exhibited lower microsaccade rates preceding correct anti- vs. prosaccade initiation, but this task-related modulation was absent in both patient groups. Regarding emotion processing, the ADHD group performed worse than controls on neutral face trials, while the BD group performed worse than controls on trials presenting faces of all valence. These findings support the role of fronto-striatal circuitry in mediating response inhibition deficits in both ADHD and BD, and suggest that such deficits are exacerbated in BD during emotion processing, presumably via dysregulated limbic system circuitry involving the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex.

Encoding of event roles from visual scenes is rapid, spontaneous, and interacts with higher-level visual processing

A crucial component of event recognition is understanding event roles, i.e. who acted on whom: boy hitting girl is different from girl hitting boy. We often categorize Agents (i.e. the actor) and Patients (i.e. the one acted upon) from visual input, but do we rapidly and spontaneously encode such roles even when our attention is otherwise occupied? In three experiments, participants observed a continuous sequence of two-person scenes and had to search for a target actor in each (the male/female or red/blue-shirted actor) by indicating with a button press whether the target appeared on the left or the right. Critically, although role was orthogonal to gender and shirt color, and was never explicitly mentioned, participants responded more slowly when the target's role switched from trial to trial (e.g., the male went from being the Patient to the Agent). In a final experiment, we demonstrated that this effect cannot be fully explained by differences in posture associated with Agents and Patients. Our results suggest that extraction of event structure from visual scenes is rapid and spontaneous.

Repetition Blindness for Faces: A Comparison of Face Identity, Expression, and Gender Judgments

Repetition blindness (RB) refers to the impairment in reporting two identical targets within a rapid serial visual presentation stream. While numerous studies have demonstrated RB for words and picture of objects, very few studies have examined RB for faces. This study extended this research by examining RB when the two faces were complete repeats (same emotion and identity), identity repeats (same individual, different emotion), and emotion repeats (different individual, same emotion) for identity, gender, and expression judgment tasks. Complete RB and identity RB effects were evident for all three judgment tasks. Emotion RB was only evident for the expression and gender judgments. Complete RB effects were larger than emotion or identity RB effects across all judgment tasks. For the expression judgments, there was more emotion than identity RB. The identity RB effect was larger than the emotion RB effect for the gender judgments. Cross task comparisons revealed larger complete RB effects for the expression and gender judgments than the identity decisions. There was a larger emotion RB effect for the expression than gender judgments and the identity RB effect was larger for the gender than for the identity and expression judgments. These results indicate that while faces are subject to RB, this is affected by the type of repeated information and relevance of the facial characteristic to the judgment decision. This study provides further support for the operation of separate processing mechanisms for face gender, emotion, and identity information within models of face recognition.

Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Interactions between Facial Expressions and Gender Information in Face Perception

To investigate the interaction between facial expressions and facial gender information during face perception, the present study matched the intensities of the two types of information in face images and then adopted the orthogonal condition of the Garner Paradigm to present the images to participants who were required to judge the gender and expression of the faces; the gender and expression presentations were varied orthogonally. Gender and expression processing displayed a mutual interaction. On the one hand, the judgment of angry expressions occurred faster when presented with male facial images; on the other hand, the classification of the female gender occurred faster when presented with a happy facial expression than when presented with an angry facial expression. According to the evoked-related potential results, the expression classification was influenced by gender during the face structural processing stage (as indexed by N170), which indicates the promotion or interference of facial gender with the coding of facial expression features. However, gender processing was affected by facial expressions in more stages, including the early (P1) and late (LPC) stages of perceptual processing, reflecting that emotional expression influences gender processing mainly by directing attention.

Processing Distracting Non-face Emotional Images: No Evidence of an Age-Related Positivity Effect

Cognitive aging may be accompanied by increased prioritization of social and emotional goals that enhance positive experiences and emotional states. The socioemotional selectivity theory suggests this may be achieved by giving preference to positive information and avoiding or suppressing negative information. Although there is some evidence of a positivity bias in controlled attention tasks, it remains unclear whether a positivity bias extends to the processing of affective stimuli presented outside focused attention. In two experiments, we investigated age-related differences in the effects of to-be-ignored non-face affective images on target processing. In Experiment 1, 27 older (64-90 years) and 25 young adults (19-29 years) made speeded valence judgments about centrally presented positive or negative target images taken from the International Affective Picture System. To-be-ignored distractor images were presented above and below the target image and were either positive, negative, or neutral in valence. The distractors were considered task relevant because they shared emotional characteristics with the target stimuli. Both older and young adults responded slower to targets when distractor valence was incongruent with target valence relative to when distractors were neutral. Older adults responded faster to positive than to negative targets but did not show increased interference effects from positive distractors. In Experiment 2, affective distractors were task irrelevant as the target was a three-digit array and did not share emotional characteristics with the distractors. Twenty-six older (63-84 years) and 30 young adults (18-30 years) gave speeded responses on a digit disparity task while ignoring the affective distractors positioned in the periphery. Task performance in either age group was not influenced by the task-irrelevant affective images. In keeping with the socioemotional selectivity theory, these findings suggest that older adults preferentially process task-relevant positive non-face images but only when presented within the main focus of attention.

Stream of consciousness: Quantum and biochemical assumptions regarding psychopathology

The accepted paradigms of mainstream neuropsychiatry appear to be incompletely adequate and in various cases offer equivocal analyses. However, a growing number of new approaches are being proposed that suggest the emergence of paradigm shifts in this area. In particular, quantum theories of mind, brain and consciousness seem to offer a profound change to the current approaches. Unfortunately these quantum paradigms harbor at least two serious problems. First, they are simply models, theories, and assumptions, with no convincing experiments supporting their claims. Second, they deviate from contemporary mainstream views of psychiatric illness and do so in revolutionary ways. We suggest a possible way to integrate experimental neuroscience with quantum models in order to address outstanding issues in psychopathology. A key role is played by the phenomenon called the "stream of consciousness", which can be linked to the so-called "Gamma Synchrony" (GS), which is clearly demonstrated by EEG data. In our novel proposal, a unipolar depressed patient could be seen as a subject with an altered stream of consciousness. In particular, some clues suggest that depression is linked to an "increased power" stream of consciousness. It is additionally suggested that such an approach to depression might be extended to psychopathology in general with potential benefits to diagnostics and therapeutics in neuropsychiatry.

Discrimination of face gender and expression under dual-task conditions

In order to test whether expression and gender can be attended to simultaneously without a cost in accuracy four experiments were carried out using a dual gender-expression task with male and female faces showing different emotional expressions that were backward masked by emotionally neutral faces. In the dual-facial condition the participants had to report both the gender and the expression of the targets. In two control conditions the participant reported either the gender or the expression of the face and indicated whether a surrounding frame was continuous or discontinuous. In Experiments 1-3, with angry and happy targets, asymmetric interference was observed. Gender discrimination, but no expression discrimination, was impaired in the dual-facial condition compared to the corresponding control. This effect was obtained with a between-subjects design in Experiment 1, with a within-subjects design in Experiment 2, and with androgynous face masks in Experiment 3. In Experiments 4a and 4b different target combinations were tested. No decrement of performance in the dual-facial task was observed for either gender or expression discrimination with fearful-disgusted (Experiment 4a) or fearful-happy faces (Experiment 4b). We conclude that the ability to attend simultaneously to gender and expression cues without a decrement in performance depends on the specific combination of expressions to be differentiated between. Happy and angry expressions are usually directed at the perceiver and command preferential attention. Under conditions of restricted viewing such as those of the present study, discrimination of these expressions is prioritized leading to impaired discrimination of other facial properties such as gender.

Interference among the Processing of Facial Emotion, Face Race, and Face Gender

People can process multiple dimensions of facial properties simultaneously. Facial processing models are based on the processing of facial properties. The current study examined the processing of facial emotion, face race, and face gender using categorization tasks. The same set of Chinese, White and Black faces, each posing a neutral, happy or angry expression, was used in three experiments. Facial emotion interacted with face race in all the tasks. The interaction of face race and face gender was found in the race and gender categorization tasks, whereas the interaction of facial emotion and face gender was significant in the emotion and gender categorization tasks. These results provided evidence for a symmetric interaction between variant facial properties (emotion) and invariant facial properties (race and gender).

Detecting gender before you know it: How implementation intentions control early gender categorization

Gender categorization is highly automatic. Studies measuring ERPs during the presentation of male and female faces in a categorization task showed that this categorization is extremely quick (around 130ms, indicated by the N170). We tested whether this automatic process can be controlled by goal intentions and implementation intentions. First, we replicated the N170 modulation on gender-incongruent faces as reported in previous research. This effect was only observed in a task in which faces had to be categorized according to gender, but not in a task that required responding to a visual feature added to the face stimuli (the color of a dot) while gender was irrelevant. Second, it turned out that the N170 modulation on gender-incongruent faces was altered if a goal intention was set that aimed at controlling a gender bias. We interpret this finding as an indicator of nonconscious goal pursuit. The N170 modulation was completely absent when this goal intention was furnished with an implementation intention. In contrast, intentions did not alter brain activity at a later time window (P300), which is associated with more complex and rather conscious processes. In line with previous research, the P300 was modulated by gender incongruency even if individuals were strongly involved in another task, demonstrating the automaticity of gender detection. We interpret our findings as evidence that automatic gender categorization that occurs at a very early processing stage can be effectively controlled by intentions.

Incongruence between Verbal and Non-Verbal Information Enhances the Late Positive Potential

Smooth social communication consists of both verbal and non-verbal information. However, when presented with incongruence between verbal information and nonverbal information, the relationship between an individual judging trustworthiness in those who present the verbal-nonverbal incongruence and the brain activities observed during judgment for trustworthiness are not clear. In the present study, we attempted to identify the impact of incongruencies between verbal information and facial expression on the value of trustworthiness and brain activity using event-related potentials (ERP). Combinations of verbal information [positive/negative] and facial expressions [smile/angry] expressions were presented randomly on a computer screen to 17 healthy volunteers. The value of trustworthiness of the presented facial expression was evaluated by the amount of donation offered by the observer to the person depicted on the computer screen. In addition, the time required to judge the value of trustworthiness was recorded for each trial. Using electroencephalography, ERP were obtained by averaging the wave patterns recorded while the participants judged the value of trustworthiness. The amount of donation offered was significantly lower when the verbal information and facial expression were incongruent, particularly for [negative × smile]. The amplitude of the early posterior negativity (EPN) at the temporal lobe showed no significant difference between all conditions. However, the amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP) at the parietal electrodes for the incongruent condition [negative × smile] was higher than that for the congruent condition [positive × smile]. These results suggest that the LPP amplitude observed from the parietal cortex is involved in the processing of incongruence between verbal information and facial expression.

Integration or separation in the processing of facial properties--a computational view

A face recognition system ought to read out information about the identity, facial expression and invariant properties of faces, such as sex and race. A current debate is whether separate neural units in the brain deal with these face properties individually or whether a single neural unit processes in parallel all aspects of faces. While the focus of studies has been directed toward the processing of identity and facial expression, little research exists on the processing of invariant aspects of faces. In a theoretical framework we tested whether a system can deal with identity in combination with sex, race or facial expression using the same underlying mechanism. We used dimension reduction to describe how the representational face space organizes face properties when trained on different aspects of faces. When trained to learn identities, the system not only successfully recognized identities, but also was immediately able to classify sex and race, suggesting that no additional system for the processing of invariant properties is needed. However, training on identity was insufficient for the recognition of facial expressions and vice versa. We provide a theoretical approach on the interconnection of invariant facial properties and the separation of variant and invariant facial properties.

Processing of spatial-frequency altered faces in schizophrenia: effects of illness phase and duration

Low spatial frequency (SF) processing has been shown to be impaired in people with schizophrenia, but it is not clear how this varies with clinical state or illness chronicity. We compared schizophrenia patients (SCZ, n = 34), first episode psychosis patients (FEP, n = 22), and healthy controls (CON, n = 35) on a gender/facial discrimination task. Images were either unaltered (broadband spatial frequency, BSF), or had high or low SF information removed (LSF and HSF conditions, respectively). The task was performed at hospital admission and discharge for patients, and at corresponding time points for controls. Groups were matched on visual acuity. At admission, compared to their BSF performance, each group was significantly worse with low SF stimuli, and most impaired with high SF stimuli. The level of impairment at each SF did not depend on group. At discharge, the SCZ group performed more poorly in the LSF condition than the other groups, and showed the greatest degree of performance decline collapsed over HSF and LSF conditions, although the latter finding was not significant when controlling for visual acuity. Performance did not change significantly over time for any group. HSF processing was strongly related to visual acuity at both time points for all groups. We conclude the following: 1) SF processing abilities in schizophrenia are relatively stable across clinical state; 2) face processing abnormalities in SCZ are not secondary to problems processing specific SFs, but are due to other known difficulties constructing visual representations from degraded information; and 3) the relationship between HSF processing and visual acuity, along with known SCZ- and medication-related acuity reductions, and the elimination of a SCZ-related impairment after controlling for visual acuity in this study, all raise the possibility that some prior findings of impaired perception in SCZ may be secondary to acuity reductions.

A critical role of holistic processing in face gender perception

Whether face gender perception is processed by encoding holistic (whole) or featural (parts) information is a controversial issue. Although neuroimaging studies have identified brain regions related to face gender perception, the temporal dynamics of this process remain under debate. Here, we identified the mechanism and temporal dynamics of face gender perception. We used stereoscopic depth manipulation to create two conditions: the front and behind condition. In the front condition, facial patches were presented stereoscopically in front of the occluder and participants perceived them as disjoint parts (featural cues). In the behind condition, facial patches were presented stereoscopically behind the occluder and were amodally completed and unified in a coherent face (holistic cues). We performed three behavioral experiments and one electroencephalography experiment, and compared the results of the front and behind conditions. We found faster reaction times (RTs) in the behind condition compared with the front, and observed priming effects and aftereffects only in the behind condition. Moreover, the EEG experiment revealed that face gender perception is processed in the relatively late phase of visual recognition (200-285 ms). Our results indicate that holistic information is critical for face gender perception, and that this process occurs with a relatively late latency.