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Abstract:
Much can be learned about a person from static face cues, yet the faces we encounter everyday move and deform in characteristic ways. This facial motion is a highly salient, natural stimulus that contains information about a person’s emotions, their focus of attention, their speech and even their identity. In behavioural experiments using video displays, we found that even subtle facial expressions can be reliably distinguished when faces are presented with their natural facial motion, and that recognition performance of such subtle expressions varies more strongly as a function of the autistic traits of healthy participants than observed with displays of basic emotions. In behavioural experiments using animated avatar faces displaying natural facial motion, we found that observers are highly sensitive to deviations from the natural motion of faces and that complex everyday face movements carry more information about the identity of a person than basic emotions. In neuroimaging (fMRI) experiments, we found that parts of the posterior superior temporal sulcus 1) are sensitive to natural facial motion while ventral temporal visual regions are not; 2) contain neural representations of subtle facial expressions; and 3) contain representations of basic emotions and face identity that are boosted by attention. Overall, our data suggest that natural facial motion stimuli engage the neural mechanisms involved in everyday social interactions particularly well, and that using such stimuli in controlled displays opens new avenues for the investigation of the social brain.
