Event-related potentials to unattended changes in facial expressions: detection of regularity violations or encoding of emotions?
Visual mismatch negativity (vMMN), a component in event-related potentials (ERPs), can be elicited when rarely presented “deviant” facial expressions violate regularity formed by repeated “standard” faces. vMMN is observed as differential ERPs elicited between the deviant and standard faces. It is not clear, however, whether differential ERPs to rare emotional faces interspersed with repeated neutral ones reflect true vMMN (i.e., detection of regularity violation) or merely encoding of the emotional content in the faces. Furthermore, a face-sensitive N170 response, which reflects structural encoding of facial features, can be modulated by emotional expressions. Owing to its similar latency …
Visuospatial attention shifts by gaze and arrow cues: an ERP study.
Orienting of visual attention can be automatically triggered not only by illumination changes occurring in the visual periphery but also by centrally presented gaze and arrow cues. We investigated whether the automatic shifts of visuospatial attention triggered by centrally displayed gaze and arrow cues rely on the same neural systems. To this end we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to the cue and target onsets while the participants (n=17) performed a spatial cuing task. In the task, the participants detected and responded to laterally presented targets preceded by centrally presented, non-predictive, gaze or arrow cues. Manual reaction times and target-triggered ERP da…
N170 response to facial expressions is modulated by the affective congruency between the emotional expression and preceding affective picture
Does contextual affective information influence the processing of facial expressions already at the relatively early stages of face processing? We measured event-related brain potentials to happy and sad facial expressions primed by preceding pictures with affectively positive and negative scenes. The face-sensitive N170 response amplitudes showed a clear affective priming effect: N170 amplitudes to happy faces were larger when presented after positive vs. negative primes, whereas the N170 amplitudes to sad faces were larger when presented after negative vs. positive primes. Priming effects were also observed on later brain responses. The results support an early integration in processing o…
Dimension reduction: additional benefit of an optimal filter for independent component analysis to extract event-related potentials.
The present study addresses benefits of a linear optimal filter (OF) for independent component analysis (ICA) in extracting brain event-related potentials (ERPs). A filter such as the digital filter is usually considered as a denoising tool. Actually, in filtering ERP recordings by an OF, the ERP' topography should not be changed by the filter, and the output should also be able to be modeled by the linear transformation. Moreover, an OF designed for a specific ERP source or component may remove noise, as well as reduce the overlap of sources and even reject some non-targeted sources in the ERP recordings. The OF can thus accomplish both the denoising and dimension reduction (reducing the n…
Mentalizing eye contact with a face on a video : Gaze direction does not influence autonomic arousal
Recent research has revealed enhanced autonomic and subjective responses to eye contact only when perceiving another live person. However, these enhanced responses to eye contact are abolished if the viewer believes that the other person is not able to look back at the viewer. We purported to investigate whether this “genuine” eye contact effect can be reproduced with pre‐recorded videos of stimulus persons. Autonomic responses, gaze behavior, and subjective self‐assessments were measured while participants viewed pre‐recorded video persons with direct or averted gaze, imagined that the video person was real, and mentalized that the person could see them or not. Pre‐recorded videos did not …
Implicit binding of facial features during change blindness
Change blindness refers to the inability to detect visual changes if introduced together with an eye-movement, blink, flash of light, or with distracting stimuli. Evidence of implicit detection of changed visual features during change blindness has been reported in a number of studies using both behavioral and neurophysiological measurements. However, it is not known whether implicit detection occurs only at the level of single features or whether complex organizations of features can be implicitly detected as well. We tested this in adult humans using intact and scrambled versions of schematic faces as stimuli in a change blindness paradigm while recording event-related potentials (ERPs). …
Anger superiority effect for change detection and change blindness
Abstract In visual search, an angry face in a crowd “pops out” unlike a happy or a neutral face. This “anger superiority effect” conflicts with views of visual perception holding that complex stimulus contents cannot be detected without focused top-down attention. Implicit visual processing of threatening changes was studied by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) using facial stimuli using the change blindness paradigm, in which conscious change detection is eliminated by presenting a blank screen before the changes. Already before their conscious detection, angry faces modulated relatively early emotion sensitive ERPs when appearing among happy and neutral faces, but happy faces only…
Look at them and they will notice you : Distractor-independent attentional capture by direct gaze in change blindness
Humans have shown a detection advantage of direct vs. averted gaze stimuli in visual search tasks. However, instead of attentional capture by direct gaze, the detection advantage in visual search may depend on attention-grabbing potential of the distractor stimuli to which the target needs to be compared. We investigated attentional capture by direct gaze using the change blindness paradigm, in which successful detection does not require comparison between the target and the distractor items. Participants detected a masked gaze direction change in one of four simultaneously presented schematic faces. The distractor gaze directions were systematically varied across three experiments. Changes…
Effects of conversation content on viewing dyadic conversations
People typically follow conversations closely with their gaze. We asked whether this viewing is influenced by what is actually said in the conversation and by the viewer’s psychological condition. We recorded the eye movements of healthy (N = 16) and depressed (N = 25) participants while they were viewing video clips. Each video showed two people, each speaking one line of dialogue about socio-emotionally important (i.e., personal) or unimportant topics (matter-of-fact). Between the spoken lines, the viewers made more saccadic shifts between the discussants, and looked more at the second speaker, in personal vs. matter-of-fact conversations. Higher depression scores were correlated with les…
LOW-RANK APPROXIMATION BASED NON-NEGATIVE MULTI-WAY ARRAY DECOMPOSITION ON EVENT-RELATED POTENTIALS
Non-negative tensor factorization (NTF) has been successfully applied to analyze event-related potentials (ERPs), and shown superiority in terms of capturing multi-domain features. However, the time-frequency representation of ERPs by higher-order tensors are usually large-scale, which prevents the popularity of most tensor factorization algorithms. To overcome this issue, we introduce a non-negative canonical polyadic decomposition (NCPD) based on low-rank approximation (LRA) and hierarchical alternating least square (HALS) techniques. We applied NCPD (LRAHALS and benchmark HALS) and CPD to extract multi-domain features of a visual ERP. The features and components extracted by LRAHALS NCP…
Low-rank approximation based non-negative multi-way array decomposition on event-related potentials
Non-negative tensor factorization (NTF) has been successfully applied to analyze event-related potentials (ERPs), and shown superiority in terms of capturing multi-domain features. However, the time-frequency representation of ERPs by higher-order tensors are usually large-scale, which prevents the popularity of most tensor factorization algorithms. To overcome this issue, we introduce a non-negative canonical polyadic decomposition (NCPD) based on low-rank approximation (LRA) and hierarchical alternating least square (HALS) techniques. We applied NCPD (LRAHALS and benchmark HALS) and CPD to extract multi-domain features of a visual ERP. The features and components extracted by LRAHALS NCPD…
How do early family systems predict emotion recognition in middle childhood?
Facial emotion recognition (FER) is a fundamental element in human interaction. It begins to develop soon after birth and is important in achieving developmental tasks of middle childhood, such as developing mutual friendships and acquiring social rules of peer groups. Despite its importance, FER research during middle childhood continues to be rather limited. Moreover, research is ambiguous on how the quality of one's early social-emotional environment shapes FER development, and longitudinal studies spanning from infancy to later development are scarce. In this study, we examine how the cohesive, authoritarian, disengaged and enmeshed family system types, assessed during pregnancy and inf…
Multi-domain feature extraction for small event-related potentials through nonnegative multi-way array decomposition from low dense array EEG
Non-negative Canonical Polyadic decomposition (NCPD) and non-negative Tucker decomposition (NTD) were compared for extracting the multi-domain feature of visual mismatch negativity (vMMN), a small event-related potential (ERP), for the cognitive research. Since signal-to-noise ratio in vMMN is low, NTD outperformed NCPD. Moreover, we proposed an approach to select the multi-domain feature of an ERP among all extracted features and discussed determination of numbers of extracted components in NCPD and NTD regarding the ERP context.
Event-related potentials to task-irrelevant changes in facial expressions
Abstract Background Numerous previous experiments have used oddball paradigm to study change detection. This paradigm is applied here to study change detection of facial expressions in a context which demands abstraction of the emotional expression-related facial features among other changing facial features. Methods Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in adult humans engaged in a demanding auditory task. In an oddball paradigm, repeated pictures of faces with a neutral expression ('standard', p = .9) were rarely replaced by pictures with a fearful ('fearful deviant', p = .05) or happy ('happy deviant', p = .05) expression. Importantly, facial identities changed from picture to pi…
Attentional bias towards interpersonal aggression in depression – an eye movement study
Depressed individuals exhibit an attentional bias towards mood-congruent stimuli, yet evidence for biased processing of threat-related information in human interaction remains scarce. Here, we tested whether an attentional bias towards interpersonally aggressive pictures over interpersonally neutral pictures could be observed to a greater extent in depressed participants than in control participants. Eye movements were recorded while the participants freely viewed visually matched interpersonally aggressive and neutral pictures, which were presented in pairs. Across the groups, participants spent more time looking at neutral pictures than at aggressive pictures, probably reflecting avoidanc…
Multi-domain Feature of Event-Related Potential Extracted by Nonnegative Tensor Factorization: 5 vs. 14 Electrodes EEG Data
As nonnegative tensor factorization (NTF) is particularly useful for the problem of underdetermined linear transform model, we performed NTF on the EEG data recorded from 14 electrodes to extract the multi-domain feature of N170 which is a visual event-related potential (ERP), as well as 5 typical electrodes in occipital-temporal sites for N170 and in frontal-central sites for vertex positive potential (VPP) which is the counterpart of N170, respectively. We found that the multi-domain feature of N170 from 5 electrodes was very similar to that from 14 electrodes and more discriminative for different groups of participants than that of VPP from 5 electrodes. Hence, we conclude that when the …
Mentalizing eye contact with a face on a video : Gaze direction does not influence autonomic arousal
Recent research has revealed enhanced autonomic and subjective responses to eye contact only when perceiving another live person. However, these enhanced responses to eye contact are abolished if the viewer believes that the other person is not able to look back at the viewer. We purported to investigate whether this "genuine" eye contact effect can be reproduced with pre-recorded videos of stimulus persons. Autonomic responses, gaze behavior, and subjective self-assessments were measured while participants viewed pre-recorded video persons with direct or averted gaze, imagined that the video person was real, and mentalized that the person could see them or not. Pre-recorded videos did not …
Event-related potentials to task-irrelevant changes in facial expressions
Abstract Background Numerous previous experiments have used oddball paradigm to study change detection. This paradigm is applied here to study change detection of facial expressions in a context which demands abstraction of the emotional expression-related facial features among other changing facial features. Methods Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in adult humans engaged in a demanding auditory task. In an oddball paradigm, repeated pictures of faces with a neutral expression ('standard', p = .9) were rarely replaced by pictures with a fearful ('fearful deviant', p = .05) or happy ('happy deviant', p = .05) expression. Importantly, facial identities changed from picture to pi…