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SUMMARY:Categorizing facial expressions of emotion with and without consci
 ous awareness  - Marie Smith (Birkbeck)
DTSTART:20140529T143000Z
DTEND:20140529T153000Z
UID:TALK51804@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Mandy Carter
DESCRIPTION:Rapid accurate categorization of the emotional state of our pe
 ers is of critical importance to human social functioning. Most studies ho
 wever focus primarily on the processing of select facial expressions of em
 otion in isolation (e.g. fear)\, leaving unresolved the question of how fa
 cial expressions are processed in more challenging ‘which expression’ 
 tasks. Here I will present results from two studies\, one that seeks to es
 tablish the time course of processing of three facial expressions of emoti
 on (fearful\, disgusted\, and happy) during objectively unaware and aware 
 perception. Although participant’s behavioral responses did not differen
 tiate between the emotional content of the stimuli in the unaware conditio
 n activity over frontal and occipitotemporal (OT) brain regions did. Furth
 ermore the nature of this neuronal response differed as a function of late
 r categorization of the emotional content of the stimuli (hits\, false ala
 rms\, correct rejections and misses). In a second series of experiments\, 
 I tested if observers make use of different visual information from expres
 sive faces depending on the nature of the categorization task. Specificall
 y I determined the facial features crucial for the categorization of three
  key facial expressions of emotion (fear\, disgust and anger) during ‘ex
 pressive or neutral‘ and ‘which expression’ categorization tasks.  R
 ather than always using the same visual information to process the same em
 otional categories\, I found that observers adapt their information use to
  target the most useful visual information.  Taken together these results 
 provide novel insight into the processing of facial expressions of emotion
  and critically also highlight the importance of considering the specifics
  of the categorization task asked of participants and their eventual categ
 orization response.
LOCATION:Lecture Theatre\, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit\, Chaucer
  Road
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