Assignment Task
Effects of Early Experience on Children’s Recognition of Facial Displays
The present research examines visual perception of emotion in both typical and atypical development. To examine the processes by which perceptual mechanisms become attuned to the contingencies of affective signals in the environment, the authors measured the sequential, content-based properties of feature detection in emotion recognition processes. To evaluate the role of experience, they compared typically developing children with physically abused children, who were presumed to have experienced high levels of threat and hostility. As predicted, physically abused children accurately identified facial displays of anger on the basis of less sensory input than did controls, which suggests that physically abused children have facilitated access to representations of anger. The findings are discussed in terms of experiential processes in perceptual learning.
Humans rely heavily on facial expressions when communicating emotional states to others. Although considerable attention has been devoted to how the nervous system responds to faces as compared with other objects (McCarthy, Puce, Gore, & Allison, 1997; Moscovitch, Winocur, & Behrmann, 1997), there are still many questions about factors that affect the perception of emotion specific information communicated by the face. Because emotions are signaled as continuous sequences of changes in facial musculature, rapid, accurate recognition of facial expressions of emotion presents a significant computational processing achievement for the developing child. To correctly identify an emotion, an observer must use early partial information from a dynamic modulation of muscle movements to generate hypotheses about what emotion is being displayed and then map those changing physical features onto categories to label, categorize, and predict the behavior of othersVisual recognition of emotion requires an observer to relatefeatures of the face to stored representations of facial features in anemotion lexicon. Here we use the term emotion lexicon to refer tostructured arrays of features, where the observer must determine anabstract concept of a subjective feeling state (such as “anger” or“sadness”) based on the detailed configural properties of the surface musculature of the face (such as a clenched jaw or raisedeyebrows).
A-Plus Writing Help For University Students
Get expert assistance in any academic field. All courses and programs covered.
Get Help Now!Thus, the representation of an emotion begins with thefine-grained details of variation in facial input and results in anemotion labeling choice (for discussions of the processes underlying recognition of facial expressions, see Pollak & Kistler, 2002;Teunisse & de Gelder, 2001; Young et al., 1997). We speculatedthat if recognition of an emotion requires access to a representation, then early, partial information about the incoming emotionalsignal must be made available immediately. In ordinary socialdiscourse, an observer would probably not wait until anotherperson’s emotional expression had peaked before trying to identifywhat it was the other person was feeling. More likely, as observerswatch a facial expression begin to form, they begin to observe andpick out clues about what emotion is being communicated—longbefore the final, peak display of the emotional expression.Therefore, we reasoned that the ability to use partial informationin affective signaling would allow an observer to begin to generatehypotheses about what another individual is feeling. Rapid recognition of emotional signals, if accurate, would facilitate adaptivesocial functioning. However, it is reasonable to expect that theassumptions observers make about the emotional states of otherswill be guided by the observers’ expectations, perceptual sensitivity, and access to mentalrepresentations of emotional knowledge.Moreover, an observer’s detection of early cues may also restrictconsideration of emotion categories as possible choices even whenthe full identity of the emotion being expressed is uncertain. Forthese reasons, it is important to better understand what factorsinfluence how individuals learn to recognize and decode emotionalinformation conveyed by the face. Two recent models have beenadvanced to account for the role of experience in facial recognition. In one model, experience-independent neural structures facilitate attention to facelike objects, and such stimulus preferenceslead to increased learning and discrimination based on experienceSeth D. Pollak, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin—Madison; Pawan Sinha, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences,Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Welcome to our Online Essay Writing Agency. Securing higher grades costing your pocket? Order your assignment online at the lowest price now! Our online essay writers are able to provide high-quality assignment help within your deadline. With our homework writing company, you can order essays, term papers, research papers, capstone projects, movie review, presentation, annotated bibliography, reaction paper, research proposal, discussion, or another assignment without having to worry about its originality – we offer 100% original content written completely from scratch
We write papers within your selected deadline. Just share the instructions
