Selective attention to facial identity and facial emotion

doi:10.1016/0028-3932(84)90075-7

Neuropsychologia

Volume 22, Issue 3, 1984, Pages 281-295

https://doi.org/10.1016/0028-3932(84)90075-7 Get rights and content

Abstract

Patients with lesions to either the right or left hemisphere and control subjects were asked to descriminate photographs of faces and then to sort these photographs according to the identity of the face or the emotion displayed. Whether identity and emotion were correlated, independent, or constant was varied across trials. Patients with right hemisphere damage were significantly impaired at discriminating both identity and expression, and at selectively attending to either sort of facial information. However, these subjects could selectively attend to attributes of geometric figures suggesting that their impairment with faces cannot be attributed to deficits in selective attention in general.

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Examples of behavioral studies include research by Ellis, Young, and Flude (1990) and by Young, McWeeny, Hay, and Ellis (1986), in which matching familiarity and repetition priming were found when the task required facial identity recognition but were not found when identifying facial expressions. Neuropsychological studies have demonstrated selective impairment of either recognition of face identity or of facial expressions following different types of brain injuries (Etcoff, 1984; Young, Newcombe, de Haan, & Hay, 1993). Functional imaging studies using PET (George et al., 1993; Sergent, Ohta, Macdonald, & Zuck, 1994) and fMRI (Winston, Henson, Fine-Goulden, & Dolan, 2004) demonstrated that recognition of face identity is mediated primarily by the fusiform gyrus, while recognition of facial expressions is primarily mediated by the superior temporal sulcus.
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In this chapter, we examine how the ecological model of vision can be applied to person perception, with a specific emphasis on the combinatorial nature of face perception. Key behavior and neuroanatomical research from the face perception literature is examined. Throughout the chapter, we stress that cues that share social signal value should not—and to a degree, cannot—be studied independently, as has been historically the case. We illustrate this point by reviewing research on the compound nature of identity cues, such as gender and race, and expressive cues, such as eye gaze and facial expressiveness. We argue that the ecological model provides a lens through which we can interpret the complicated nature of person and face perception, helping to reduce the complexities surrounding the study of compound social cue integration.
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These results represent an example of what has been referred to as “asymmetric Garner interference” (see Schweinberger, Burton, & Kelly, 1999). However, the classification of facial identities and emotions may not be the most appropriate task to assess possible deficits at filtering visual information because the interaction between these 2 dimensions still remains unclear and also because the ability to recognize faces has been found to be particularly damaged in schizophrenia (Etcoff, 1984; Schweinberger et al., 1999). The ability to filter out irrelevant visual information was investigated, in the current study, in a group of schizophrenic patients after an acute psychotic episode, using both integral and separable dimensions.
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A possible limitation of the study is the relatively small sample.
Our findings suggest the presence of attention deficits in filtering out irrelevant visual information in schizophrenia that could be related to positive symptomatology.
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View full text

Selective attention to facial identity and facial emotion

Abstract

Cortex

Brain Lang.

J. Exp. Child Psychol.

Cognitive Psychol.

Brain Lang.

Cortex

Cortex

Brain Lang.

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Organic implications of neuropsychological deficits in the elderly

Nonverbal sensitivity following lateralized cerebral injury

J. McLean Hosp.

Sex, personality and physiological variables in the communication of affect via facial expression

J. Person. Soc. Psychol.

Face perception: Anomalies of development

Facial recognition in brain-damaged patients: An experimental approach

Neurology