According to the two-systems account of theory of mind (ToM), understanding mental states of others involves both fast social-perceptual processes, as well as slower, reflexive cognitive operations (Frith and Frith, 2008; Apperly and Butterfill, 2009). To test the respective roles of specific abilities in either of these processes we administered 15 experimental procedures to a large sample of ...

BACKGROUND Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impairments in social cognition. The biological basis of deficits in social cognition in ASD, and their difficulty in processing emotional face information in particular, remains unclear. Atypical communication within and between brain regions has been reported in ASD. Interregional phase-locking is a ne...

PURPOSE Interacting with others by reading their emotional expressions is an essential social skill in humans. How this ability develops during infancy and what brain processes underpin infants' perception of emotion in different modalities are the questions dealt with in this paper. METHODS Literature review. RESULTS The first part provides a systematic review of behavioral findings on inf...

In visual search tasks, an angry face surrounded by happy faces is more rapidly detected compared with a happy face surrounded by angry faces. This is called the anger superiority effect. The anger superiority effect has been mainly related to automatic attentional effects, but top-down mechanisms may also influence this effect. In a series of studies, we investigated the influence of holding e...

The speed of visual processing is central to our understanding of face perception. Yet the extent to which early visual processing influences later processing in distributed face processing networks, and the top-down modulation of such bottom-up effects, remains unclear. We used simultaneous EEG-fMRI to investigate cortical activity that showed unique covariation with ERP components of face pro...