This study investigated the role of bottom-up and top-down neural mechanisms in the processing of emotional face expression during memory formation. Functional brain imaging data was acquired during incidental learning of positive ("happy"), neutral and negative ("angry" or "fearful") faces. Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) was applied on the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to ch...

To study the ability of humans to read subtle changes in facial expression, we applied reverse correlation technique to reveal visual features that mediate understanding of emotion expressed by the face. Surprising findings were that (1) the noise added to a test face image had profound effect on the facial expression and (2) in almost every instance the new expression was meaningful. To quanti...

Although schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorders have both similar and differing clinical features, it is not well understood whether similar or differing pathophysiological processes mediate patients' cognitive functions. Using psychophysical methods, this study compared the performances of schizophrenia (SZ) patients, patients with schizoaffective disorder (SA), and a healthy control grou...

How does holistic/configural processing, a key property of face perception, vary with distance from an observed person? Two techniques measured holistic processing in isolation from part-based contributions to face perception: salience bias to upright in transparency displays, and a difficult-to-see Mooney face. Results revealed an asymmetric inverted-U-shaped tuning to simulated observer-targe...

Twenty-three schizophrenia subjects were compared with healthy and clinical control subjects on an emotional priming task. Positive and negative emotional facial expressions were presented as primes, followed by a neutral pattern mask, then an emotionally neutral face as target. The prime-mask-target sequence was arranged to allow conscious perception of only the targets. Subjects had to judge ...

Recognizing faces swiftly and accurately is of paramount importance to humans as a social species. Individual differences in the ability to perform these tasks may therefore reflect important aspects of social or emotional intelligence. Although functional models of face cognition based on group and single case studies postulate multiple component processes, little is known about the ability st...

The face conveys a rich source of non-verbal information used during social communication. While research has revealed how specific facial channels such as emotional expression are processed, little is known about the prioritization and integration of multiple cues in the face during dyadic exchanges. Classic models of face perception have emphasized the segregation of dynamic vs. static facial...

The perceived duration of emotional face stimuli strongly depends on the expressed emotion. But, emotional faces also differ regarding a number of other features like gaze, face direction, or sex. Usually, these features have been controlled by only using pictures of female models with straight gaze and face direction. Doi and Shinohara (2009) reported that an overestimation of angry faces coul...