Week 5

Question 1

What is social cognition?

Answer 1

Any cognitive process implicated in social information processing e.g. oneself and other people, group level or on a one to one basis

Question 2

Give examples of social cognition and self other processes?

Answer 2

-communicating/sending social information
-perceiving and attending to social information (gaze, motion, facial expressions and emotions)
-predicting and responding to other’s intentions and feelings (theory of mind, empathy, self/other control- switching between representations of self and other)

Question 3

What are the two types of eye movements?

Answer 3

Fixation and saccades

Question 4

What is fixation?

Answer 4

Stability, high resolution at fovea, reduced blur

Question 5

What is saccades?

Answer 5

Change in gaze direction (3-4x sec)

Question 6

What is gaze central to?

Answer 6

Social interaction

Question 7

Is gaze the inky factor of interaction?

Answer 7

No. Interaction is multimodal

Question 8

How do you measure gaze?

Answer 8

-eye link
-imotions
-eye tracking

Question 9

How do you process information?

Answer 9

-through faces
-gaze of others
-speech
-movement, bodies, actions

Question 10

Do babies have early gaze social biases?

Answer 10

Yes, according to M.H. Johnson et al, and also fetuses may respond to faces while in the womb according to M.H. Johnson

Question 11

What are the two processes that occur to learn and recognise faces?

Answer 11

Encoding and decoding

Question 12

What reduces recognition during the encoding process?

Answer 12

Restricting fixations, particularly to eyes at encoding

Question 13

What occurs during recognition for it to be impaired?

Answer 13

Restricting gaze

Question 14

Who said this?

Answer 14

Laidlaw and Kingston’s (2017)

Question 15

What is a limitation of Laidlaw and Kingstone’s paradigm?

Answer 15

It isn’t really gaze contingent

Question 16

How many fixations suffice and who said this?

Answer 16

2, Hsiao and Cottrell 2008

Question 17

What are bubbles?

Answer 17

A psychophysics method to identify physical features of stimuli correlated with perceptual decisions

Question 18

What did Caldara et al. show about prosopagnosics?

Answer 18

That prosopagnosics following brain damage showed reduced use of eye information

Question 19

What did Schurgin et al.,2014 say about diagnostic emotion information?

Answer 19

That it varies by facial expressions

Question 20

What did Schurgin ET al. 2014 say about gaze behaviour?

Answer 20

It differentiates emotional expressions

Question 21

Do we need fixations to recognise emotional expressions?

Answer 21

All expressions were recognised above chance parafoveal and peripherally, but surprised, disgusted, sad, angry, and fearful were less recognised than happy in the experiment by Calvo et al. 2013

Question 22

Do specific fixations generate successful face and expression recognition?

Answer 22

No

Question 23

What does gaze direction afford to social interaction?

Answer 23

-locus of others’ attention
-spatial cues
-intention and mental states

Question 24

Is gaze cuing present early in infancy?

Answer 24

Yes, adults eyes trigger shifts of visual attention in human infants, according to Bruce ET al. 1998

Question 25

What did Gibson and Pick 1963 say about perception of gaze direction?

Answer 25

That it is influenced by both head and eye position, observers are sensitive to even slight deviations in gaze direction, this is a crucial signal that we need to detect

Question 26

What is dual function?

Answer 26

The fact that in interaction, gazes acquire and signal information

Question 27

What is more synchronous during eye contact?

Answer 27

Dyads

Question 28

Describe the findings of early eye-tracking in ASD by Pelphrey et al, 2002

Answer 28

-non-autistic people displayed a more holistic scan path -asd displayed erratic gaze and apparent eye avoidance

Question 29

What are the three social gaze hypotheses of autism?

Answer 29

-hyperarousal/ eye avoidance -hypoarousal/orientation -atypical subcortical-cortical maturation

Question 30

What did Kliemann et al 2011, 2013 find about hyperarousal and eye avoidance in those with asd?

Answer 30

-Fixation to eyes is related to abnormally intense activation of the amygdala in asd -Manipulating initial fixation increased mouth but no eye attention in autism -this suggests active eye avoidance rather than a passive lack of eye attention

Question 31

What does eye contact and subcortical processing state (three things)?

Answer 31

-subcortical route in early development supports social biases (e.g. to eyes) -atypical eye contact= a lack of influence from a subcortical face and eye contact detection route -abnormal connectivity between cortical social brain areas and subcortical

Question 32

What is E/I Imbalance?

Answer 32

When the brain maintains a balance between excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmission

Question 33

What happens if the balance is disrupted?

Answer 33

Increased excitation or reduced inhibition leads to sensory overload, cognitive difference, and repetitive behaviours in ASD

Question 34

What does this mean for eye contact?

Answer 34

Aversive eye contact and reduced eyes and face experience

Question 35

What does the E/I imbalance hypothesis suggest?

Answer 35

That the potential neural underpinning of abnormal eye contact are malleable to intervention. But beware of reverse inference, and lack of control tasks

Question 36

What is strongly predictive of diagnostic trajectory according to Jones and Klin 2013?

Answer 36

Early gaze within six months

Question 37

What modulates gaze allocation?

Answer 37

Individual differences

Question 38

What does developmental perspective highlight?

Answer 38

Early biases and changes, likely related to experience and maturation

Question 39

What is atypical gaze linked to?

Answer 39

Atypical socio-emotional processes in autism, which are partly genetically determined