Lecture 5: Faces and bodies (NSBED, UU)

Social Intelligence hypothesis: to outsmart the other, stronger animals, humans have to join forces. The ability to understand and predict complex social interactions is the main pressure for human intellectual development.

According to Haxby’s model of face encoding, you can divide a core system and an extended system:

• Core: coding of basic features that constitute a face
• Extended: cognitive and higher order processing such as emotions and biographic information.

Fusiform face area: located in the ventral stream on the ventral surface of the temporal lobe on the lateral side of the fusiform gyrus.

It takes 170 seconds for a person to recognize a face as a face (see picture).

[note: deze afbeelding uit het college is door de WorldSupporter redactie verwijderd wegens vermoedelijke inbreuk op het auteursrecht] 

The structural encoding of the face features is suggested to be separate from the processing of the emotional content.

There is increasing evidence that the cerebellum is involved in implicit and explicit cognitive processing of emotional faces.

When looking at threatful faces, the excitability of the motor cortex increases and it takes less effort to make a movement. 

Mimicking: as response to a negative emotional face, you are tended to respond with a negative emotion.

Bodily posture is another important feature that we use to infer emotional states and intention of others.

Embodiment: putting oneself in the skin of others or empathy in its original meaning of perspective taking.

There are three circuits in emotional body language:

1. Reflex-like emotional body language
2. Body awareness of emotional body language
3. Visuomotor perception of emotional body language: the system that makes the transition between the experience of the emotional body expression towards the action.

[note: deze afbeelding uit het college is door de WorldSupporter redactie verwijderd wegens vermoedelijke inbreuk op het auteursrecht]

When looking at angry body postures, the excitability of the motor cortex increases and it takes less effort to make undertake action.

The cerebellum contributes to the understanding of emotional faces/postures and embodiment.

Take home message: the brain contains dedicated neural circuits associated with the processing of faces and bodies in support of non-verbal social communication, intentions of others and action selection.

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