Face recognition (Psychology) Research Papers (original) (raw)

2025, BMC Psychology

Background While some research indicates that individuals can accurately judge smile authenticity of enjoyment and masking smile expressions, other research suggest modest judgment rates of masking smiles. The current study explored the role of emotion-related individual differences in the judgment of authenticity and recognition of negative emotions in enjoyment and masking smile expressions as a potential explanation for the differences observed.

2025, Cortex

programming of exploratory movements. The cross-modal transfer of information via visual perception permits the activation of a partially degraded image, which alone does not allow the proper recognition of the initial tactile stimulus.

2025, F1000Research

Fifty-eight full term English infants took part in the study. Twenty-three 5-month old infants (mean age = 170 days, SD = 16.8) and twenty 8-month old infants (mean age = 258 days, SD = 13.8) were in the test groups. Fifteen 5-month old... more

2025, Behavioural Brain Research

 Sleep deprivation (SD) reduces novel object/location recognition memory scores.  SD also decreases the expression of synaptophysin, synapsin I and PSD-95 protein.  Caffeine and modafinil improve novel object recognition memory during... more

2025, Seminars in hearing

Ira Hirsh was among the first to recognize that the auditory system does not deal with temporal information in a unitary way across the continuum of time intervals involved in speech processing. He identified the short range (extending from 1 to 20 milliseconds) as that of phase perception, the range between 20 and 100 milliseconds as that in which auditory patterns emerge, and the long range from 100 milliseconds and longer as that of separate auditory events. Furthermore, he also was among the first to recognize that auditory time perception heavily depended on spectral context. A study of the perception of sequences representing different temporal orders of three tones, by Hirsh and the author (e.g., Divenyi and Hirsh, 1978) demonstrated the dependence of auditory sequence perception on both time range and spectral context, and provided a bridge between Hirsh's view of auditory time and Bregman's view of stream segregation. A subsequent search by the author for psychophys...

2025, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

A possible auditory analogy of the visual phi phenomenon is a perceptual similarity, between sudden and continuous frequency transitions. Listeners heard 300-msec tone bursts, each comprised of three parts: the first and third were steady frequencies, f1 and f2, and the second or middle part was either a 20-msec glide or a silent gap of variable duration. Both the method of adjustment and the 2AFC paradigm were used to establish what gap duration yielded no or minimal discrimination between the two types of burst. Although perceptual identity is rarely reported, the jump-versus-glide discrimination is poorest when a 20-msec glide is paired with a gap of 1–2 msec. The gap duration corresponding to such “similarity” decreases as the frequency difference between f1 f2 decreases. [Supported by PHS grant by NINDS.]

2025, Perception & Psychophysics

2025, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

fMRI studies of recognition memory have often been interpreted to mean that the hippocampus selectively subserves recollection and that adjacent regions selectively subserve familiarity. Yet, many of these studies have confounded recollection and familiarity with strong and weak memories. In a source memory experiment, we compared correct source judgments (which reflect recollection) and incorrect source judgments (often thought to reflect familiarity) while equating for old-new memory strength by including only high-confidence hits in the analysis. Hippocampal activity associated with both correct source judgments and incorrect source judgments exceeded the activity associated with forgotten items and did so to a similar extent. Further, hippocampal activity was greater for high-confidence old decisions relative to forgotten items even when source decisions were at chance. These results identify a recollection signal in the hippocampus and may identify a familiarity signal as well. Similar results were obtained in the parahippocampal gyrus. Unlike in the medial temporal lobe, activation in prefrontal cortex increased differentially in association with source recollection.

2025

My research interests pursue a more complete understanding of the cognitive neuroscience of declarative memory, the functional roles of the hippocampus and the medial temporal lobe, and how affect modulates memory. Innovative Research Grant awarded by the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind (2007). Publications Wais, P., Squire, L. & Wixted, J. ( ). The hippocampus subserves recollection of word pairs and strong memory associated with item recognition. in preparation Mickes, L., Wais, P. & Wixted, J. ( ). Recollection is a continuous process: implications for dual process theories of recognition memory. in review Wais, P., Squire, L. & Wixted, J. ( ). An fMRI signal for both familiarity and recollection in the hippocampus. in review . Recognition memory processes in the medial temporal lobe: a quantitative meta-analysis of fMRI results. in review ix VITA (continued) Wais, P., . Remember/Know judgments probe degrees of recollection.

2025, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

People are generally skilled at using a confidence scale to rate the strength of their memories over a wide range. Specifically, low-confidence recognition decisions are often associated with close-to-chance accuracy, whereas high-confidence recognition decisions can be associated with close-to-perfect accuracy. However, using a 20-point rating scale, the authors found that the ability to scale memory strength had its limitations in that a high proportion of list items received the highest rating of 20. Efforts to induce participants to differentiate between these strong memories using emphatic instructions and alternative scales were not successful. Remember/know judgments indicated that these strong and hard-to-scale memories were often based on familiarity (not just recollection). Providing error feedback on a plurals discrimination task finally produced a high-confidence criterion shift. The authors suggest that the ability to scale strong (and almost perfectly accurate) memories may be limited because of the absence of differential error feedback for very strong memories in the past (the kind of differential error feedback that may account for the memory-scaling expertise that participants otherwise exhibit).

2025

There appear to be three independent systems for allocating attention: space-based, feature based, and object-based. Here, we review the literature of object-based attention to determine its underlying mechanisms. First, findings from unconscious priming and cuing suggest that the pre-attentive targets of object-based attention can be fully developed object representations. Next, the control of object-based attention appears to come from ventral visual areas specialized in object analysis that project downward to early visual areas. Whether feedback from object areas can accurately target the object’s specific locations and features is controversial, but recent work in autoencoding has made this plausible. Finally, we suggest that the three classic modes of attention may not be as independent as is commonly considered, and instead could rely on object-based attention for all three modes of selection. Specifically, studies show that attention can spread over the separated members of ...

2025, College Of Basic Education Researches Journal

In this study the perception of word juncture in English and Arabic is investigated. Word juncture is taken as the allophonic, or phonetic, variation at word boundary that is contrastive. It is hypothesized that minimal pairs differentiated by means of juncture ( or boundary features) cannot be identified when heard in isolation and that the sentential context helps identifying the phrases of the pair. Corpuses of English and Arabic minimal pairs of juncture phrases were collected and native speakers of English and Arabic were asked to pronounce these phrases in isolation and then to use them in sentences. Three groups of subjects (a group of 13 Undergraduate students of English, a group of 11 MA students of English and a group of 9 Lecturers, all being native speakers of Arabic) were chosen to carry out the experimental part of the study. Four perception tests were carried out: two on English and two on Arabic. These tests were designated to examine the subjects' precision in t...

2025, Experimental Aging Research

Inhibition is considered to have an important role in memory retrieval. However, many experimental results suggest that its efficiency declines with aging. In this study, the authors tested this hypothesis by using the retrieval-practice task. The retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) observed with this paradigm is normally explained in terms of inhibition. Young (mean age 21.5 years) and older (mean age 71.6 years) adults studied sets of four shared-subject sentences. A retrieval-practice phase required participants to repeatedly recall a subset of the studied sentences. In the final test, participants were provided item-specific cues and told to recall all the studied sentences. RIF was similar for both age groups, suggesting comparable inhibitory efficiency in young and older adults.

2025, Psychiatria Polska

CelPomimo burzliwego rozwoju badań nad zaburzeniami poznania społecznego w schizofrenii nadal trwają poszukiwania szerszych modeli konceptualnych, w tym uwzględniających teorie sieciowe, wyjaśniających obserwowane zaburzenia. Celem naszej pracy była ocena struktury procesów poznania społecznego w schizofrenii na tle grupy porównawczej osób zdrowych psychicznie.MetodaMateriał: Badaniami objęto grupę 55 osób: 30 pacjentów z rozpoznaniem schizofrenii paranoidalnej wg DSM-IV w okresie remisji oraz 25 osób tworzących grupę kontrolną, dobraną pod kątem wieku, płci i wykształcenia do grupy klinicznej. Metody. W celu oceny procesów poznania społecznego zastosowano baterię testów złożoną z: „Theory of Mind Picture Stories Test” służący do badania Teorii Umysłu, próby „Twarze” z zestawu ekspresji mimicznych ze zbioru Ekmana i Friesena i „Figury” z publikacji Argyle’a – w celu oceny rozpoznawania emocji na podstawie, odpowiednio ekspresji mimicznej i ekspresji pozy oraz dodatkowo ocenę samokry...

2025, Psychiatria Polska

Despite rapid development of research on social cognition (SC) impairments in schizophrenia, efforts are still made to generate new, broader theoretical models which include the neural network approach to those dysfunctions. The aim of this study was the evaluation of the structure of SC in patients with schizophrenia in comparison to healthy subjects. Methods. The studied groups consisted of 55 subjects: 30 patients with paranoid schizophrenia according to DSM-IV criteria, and 25 control healthy subjects matched for age, gender and education to the clinical group. In order to assess processes of SC, a battery of tests was administered: Theory of Mind Picture Stories to assess theory of mind, trials "Faces" (from Ekman and Friesen's set of emotional expressions) and "Figures" (from the publication by Argyle) to evaluate recognition of emotions from facial and gesture expression. The methods included also an assessment of self-criticism (insight) relating to the subject's processes of SC. Results. The level of efficacy of SC was lower in the patients compared to the controls. In the clinical group, theory of mind was the most important factor for the overall level of SC and its impairments. There was inadequate, decreased patients' self-criticism regarding their execution of SC tests. The insight did not correlate with any other SC variables in the clinical group. In general, the group characterized by lower integration of social cognitive processes, also obtained lower scores in individual dimensions of SC. Conclusions. The structure of social cognitive processes in schizophrenic group, unlike in healthy subjects, shows characteristics of generalized disintegration.

2025, Salud mental

Introduction. There is evidence to suggest that individuals with schizophrenia have greater difficulty in recognizing facial emotions, which has been related to cognitive impairment and higher symptom severity in this disease and seems to lead to a worse functional prognosis. Objective. To determine the association between facial emotion recognition and symptom severity, functionality, and cognitive impairment in a sample of schizophrenic patients. Method. This is an observational, cross-sectional, and correlational study conducted on 72 patients. The following scales: PANSS, MOCA, ERI, and FACT-Sz were used to assess symptom severity in schizophrenia, cognitive functioning, facial emotion recognition, and functionality, respectively. The Pearson Correlation Coefficient was used to measure the linear association between all variables. Results. Overall, moderate symptom severity and mild cognitive and functional disability were found. The most frequently recognized emotion was joy (7...

2025, NeuroImage

In our current study we employed whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) to identify neurophysiological correlates (event-related fields, ERFs) of different phenomenologies in human recognition memory. Words which had previously been semantically processed were presented along with previously unstudied words. Via button presses, participants provided subjective indices of three forms of memory: confident recognition, familiarity-based recognition, and misclassification of previously presented items as new (no recognition, misses). Behavioral results revealed a clear distinction between confident recognition (shortest reaction times) and familiarity-based recognition and misses, respectively, and physiological data pointed to bilateral anterior and left anterior/central regions in which magnetic field patterns were directly related to word recognition from ¨300 ms to 500 ms after word onset. In the context of the prevalent dual process controversy on the roles of familiarity and recollection in recognition memory, we first highlight that two operationalizations of recollection need to be differentiated: We argue that a strategic search for a particular contextual feature stands in clear contrast to the fast and incidental availability of some contextual feature and derive experimental and behavioral indicators for either form of recollection. These indicators are used to select from manifold cognitive neuroscientific work on recognition memory in order to further discuss the neurocognitive characteristics of incidental recollection in contrast to other forms of episodic memory.

2025, PLOS ONE

Behavioral studies of spoken word memory have shown that context congruency facilitates both word and source recognition, though the level at which context exerts its influence remains equivocal. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants performed both types of recognition task with words spoken in four voices. Two voice parameters (i.e., gender and accent) varied between speakers, with the possibility that none, one or two of these parameters was congruent between study and test. Results indicated that reinstating the study voice at test facilitated both word and source recognition, compared to similar or no context congruency at test. Behavioral effects were paralleled by two ERP modulations. First, in the word recognition test, the left parietal old/new effect showed a positive deflection reflective of context congruency between study and test words. Namely, the same speaker condition provided the most positive deflection of all correctly identified old words. In the source recognition test, a right frontal positivity was found for the same speaker condition compared to the different speaker conditions, regardless of response success. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that the benefit of context congruency is reflected behaviorally and in ERP modulations traditionally associated with recognition memory.

2025, Clinical Neurophysiology

The neonatal period, i.e., the first 4 weeks of life, is the time when the brain has the lowest seizure threshold. Seizures occur in 1.8–5/1000 live births in the United States (Jensen, 2009), and are caused by hypoxic, ischemic, hemorrhagic, infectious or metabolic derangements of the brain, or may occur spontaneously. By far, the commonest cause of symptomatic neonatal seizures is hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, which represents two thirds of all neonatal seizures (Tekgul et al., 2006). Importantly, clinical neonatal seizures in the setting of birth asphyxia are associated with worse neurodevelopmental outcome, which includes the late development of epilepsy, regardless of the severity of the insult to the brain (Glass et al., 2009). Thus, recognition and treatment of clinical and subclinical seizures in at-risk neonates are theoretically central for a significant reduction in morbidity and mortality associated with neonatal encephalopathy (McBride et al., 2000). Since 80% of electrographic neonatal seizures are not accompanied by clinical manifestations (subclinical seizures), EEG is essential for diagnosis (Clancy, 2006). Indeed, conventional EEG (cEEG) is still considered the gold standard for neonatal seizure recognition in the neonatal intensive care units (NICU). Unfortunately, this approach is not always feasible in the NICU, first because it requires the application and maintenance of too many electrodes, second because it demands qualified EEG technologists, and finally because it usually depends on the availability of a 24-h clinical neurophysiologist. Amplitude-integrated EEG (aEEG) is a method of simplified EEG monitoring, and represents a useful tool for continuous assessment of electrical brain function in the NICU (Rosén, 2006). This method is based on a time-compressed (usually 6 cm/h) semilogarithmic display of peak-to-peak amplitude of the EEG signal values, asymmetrically filtered (bandpass of 2–15 Hz), to extract the activity centered in the alpha band. The rational for this processing is to minimize lowand high-frequency artifacts (Toet et al., 2008). The aEEG has found an increasing clinical application in the NICU, and is particularly useful for the assessment of background pattern; presence, quality and time of onset of sleep–wake cycling; and detection of epileptic seizure activity in neonates (de Vries and Toet, 2006; Toet and Lemmers, 2009). Recently, several papers have been published measuring the accuracy of aEEG for detecting epileptic seizure activity (Bourez-Swartz et al., 2009; Shah et al., 2008; Shellhaas and Clancy, 2007). In general, sensitivity varied between 76% and 92%, which in turn makes aEEG a reliable tool for long-term monitoring of at-risk neonates. Variation in the results are probably related to distinct seizure characteristics (rate, duration, localization), technical issues (number of electrodes used), and expertise of interpreters. Regarding seizure characteristics, in the study of Shellhaas and Clancy (2007), using aEEG, less than a half of neonatal seizures in the frontal regions could be detected; the same low sensitivity was found for longstanding episodes (i.e., status epilepticus). Considering the number of electrodes, van Rooij et al. demonstrated that placement of additional electrodes could provide significant additional information, particularly a few concerning the background pattern in babies with unilateral injuries (van Rooij et al., 2010a). Moreover, Bourez-Swartz et al. found a slightly better seizure pattern detection rate with multichannel aEEG, compared with single channel (C4–C3) aEEG (Bourez-Swartz et al., 2009). The study by Frenkel et al. (2011), in this issue, focuses on the interpreter’s skill in the use of aEEG for detection of neonatal seizures. They compared cEEG with aEEG, using readers with different levels of expertise. For aEEG, readers were a neonatologist, a fellow and a medical student. On the other hand, cEEG was assessed by two neurologists and a neonatologist (blind for previous aEEG). The other main objective of the study was to assess the ability of aEEG to detect seizures before cEEG recordings are obtained. Each 10 min epoch of aEEG recording was time-locked to a concordant cEEG epoch. Next, each epoch was blindly assessed for seizure activity by three independent investigators for each modality. Seizure activity was defined as an abrupt rise of the lower border with a simultaneous rise of the upper border of the recorded strip, with a simultaneous raw EEG seizure activity of at least 10 s duration (Hellstrom-Westas and Rosen, 2006). Concordance between methods and readers was analyzed by epochs and by seizure episodes detections separately. When compared with cEEG, specificity of the student’s aEEG assessment was low, especially per seizure episode detection. In contrast, good agreement was found between the results of both the fellow and the neonatologist. Accuracy of non-expert use of aEEG, with concomitant…

2025, Neuropharmacology

It is well known that an impairment of learning and memory function is one of the major physiological effects caused by natural or synthetic cannabinoid consumption in rodents, nonhuman primates and in humans. JWH-018 and its halogenated derivatives (JWH-018-Cl and JWH-018-Br) are synthetic CB1/CB2 cannabinoid agonists, illegally marketed as "Spice" and "herbal blend" for their Cannabis-like psychoactive effects. In the present study the effects of acute exposure to JWH-018, JWH-018-Cl, JWH-018-Br (JWH-018-R compounds) and Δ(9)-THC (for comparison) on Novel Object Recognition test (NOR) has been investigated in mice. Moreover, to better characterize the effects of JWH-018-R compounds on memory function, in vitro electrophysiological and neurochemical studies in hippocampal preparations have been performed. JWH-018, JWH-018-Cl and JWH-018-Br dose-dependently impaired both short- and long-memory retention in mice (respectively 2 and 24 h after training session). Th...

2025, PLOS ONE

Background: It is well documented that East Asians differ from Westerners in conscious perception and attention. However, few studies have explored cultural differences in unconscious processes such as implicit learning. Methodology/Principal Findings: The global-local Navon letters were adopted in the serial reaction time (SRT) task, during which Chinese and British participants were instructed to respond to global or local letters, to investigate whether culture influences what people acquire in implicit sequence learning. Our results showed that from the beginning British expressed a greater local bias in perception than Chinese, confirming a cultural difference in perception. Further, over extended exposure, the Chinese learned the target regularity better than the British when the targets were global, indicating a global advantage for Chinese in implicit learning. Moreover, Chinese participants acquired greater unconscious knowledge of an irrelevant regularity than British participants, indicating that the Chinese were more sensitive to contextual regularities than the British. Conclusions/Significance: The results suggest that cultural biases can profoundly influence both what people consciously perceive and unconsciously learn.

2025, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory

Long-term memory formation requires gene expression after acquisition of new information. The first 27 step in the regulation of gene expression is the participation of transcription factors (TFs) such as nuclear 28 factor kappa B (NF-rB), which are present before the neuronal activity induced by training. It was 29 proposed that the activation of these types of TFs allows a second step in gene regulation by induction 30 of immediate-early genes (IEGs) whose protein products are, in turn, TFs. Between these IEGs, zif268 31 has been found to play a critical role in long-term memory formation and reprocessing after retrieval. 32 Here we found in mice hippocampus that, on one hand, NF-rB was activated 45 min after training in a 33 novel object recognition (NOR) task and that inhibiting NF-rB immediately after training by 34 intrahippocampal administration of NF-rB Decoy DNA impaired NOR memory consolidation. On the 35 other hand, Zif268 protein expression was induced 45 min after NOR training and the administration 36 of DNA antisense to its mRNA post-training impaired recognition memory. Finally, we found that the 37 inhibition of NF-rB by NF-rB Decoy DNA reduced significantly the training-induced Zif268 increment, 38 indicating that NF-rB is involved in the regulation of Zif268 expression. Thus, the present results support 39 the involvement of NF-rB activity-dependent Zif268 expression in the hippocampus during recognition 40 memory consolidation. 41

2025, American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry

Objective: Depression is a common disorder associated with suffering, morbidity, and mortality in nursing home residents. It is treatable, and improving the quality of treatment can have a major impact. Methods: MPRO, Michigan's Quality Improvement Organization, initiated a quality-improvement project in 14 nursing facilities to improve the accuracy of assessments, targeting, and monitoring of care. Electronic Minimum Data Set (MDS) data and medical-record abstraction results were combined to form the analytic dataset. Results: Findings from the baseline phase demonstrated that, according to medical and administrative records, 26% of newly admitted nursing home residents had symptoms of depression that were apparent at admission, and an additional 12% were recognized early in their stay. Eighty-one percent of residents with depression were receiving treatment on admission to the facility, and 79% of those with depression recognized by Day 14 were treated by then. Conclusions: These data demonstrate progress toward improving the initiation of treatment for depression in nursing homes; however, there are still opportunities for improving the quality of care and, especially, the quality of assessments. The authors recommend the addition of the Geriatric Depression Scale to the federally mandated MDS for cognitively intact patients. There could also be mechanisms to ensure that providers and facilities follow recommended practice guidelines. Initiating treatment with antidepressant medications should be followed with monitoring of residents to identify those who still have depressive symptoms and to modify or intensify their treatment. (Am J Geriatr Psychiatry 2004; 12:288-295)

2025, The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry

2025, Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges

2025, Psychological Review

The optimal strategy in detection theory is to partition the decision axis at a criterion C, labeling all events that score above C "Signal", and all those that fall below "Noise." The optimal position of C, C ‫ء‬ , depends on signal probability and payoffs. If observers place their criterion at some place other than C ‫ء‬ , they suffer a loss in the Expected Value (EV) of payoffs over the course of many decisions. We provide an explicit equation for the degree of loss, where it is shown that the falloff in value will be steep in contexts of good discrimination and will be a flatter gradient in contexts of poor discrimination. It is these gradients of loss in EV that, in theory, drive C toward C ‫ء‬ , strongly when discrimination is good, weakly when discrimination is poor. When signal probabilities or distributions variances are unequal, the basins of attraction are asymmetric, so that dynamic adjustments in C will be asymmetric, and thus, as we show, will leave it biased. We address our analysis to acquisition speed, response variability, discrimination reversal and other aspects of discriminated performance. In the final section, we develop an error correction model that predicts empirically observed deviations from C ‫ء‬ that are inconsistent with the standard model, but follow from the proposed model given knowledge of d=.

2025, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Acoustic-phonetic approaches to forensic voice comparison often include human-supervised measurement of vowel formants, but the reliability of such measurements is a matter of concern. This study assesses the within- and between-supervisor variability of three sets of formant-trajectory measurements made by each of four human supervisors. It also assesses the validity and reliability of forensic-voice-comparison systems based on these measurements. Each supervisor's formant-trajectory system was fused with a baseline mel-frequency cepstral-coefficient system, and performance was assessed relative to the baseline system. Substantial improvements in validity were found for all supervisors' systems, but some supervisors' systems were more reliable than others.

2025, Neuropharmacology

Binge alcohol drinking is increasing among the young adult population and its consumption during pregnancy can be deleterious for the fetal development. Maternal alcohol consumption leads to a wide range of long-lasting morphological and behavioral deficiencies known as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD), associated with neurodevelopmental disabilities. We sought to test the effects of alcohol on neuroimmune system activation and its potential relation with alcohol-induced neurodevelopmental and neurobehavioral persistent effects in offspring after maternal alcohol binge drinking during the prenatal period, or in combination with lactation. Pregnant C57BL/6J female mice underwent a procedure for binge alcohol drinking either during the gestation or both the gestation and lactation periods. Subsequently, adult male offspring were assessed for cognitive functions and motor coordination. Early alcohol exposure induced motor coordination impairments in the rotarod test. Object recognition test was not significantly affected by maternal binge alcohol drinking, but Y-maze performance was impaired in pre-and early postnatal alcohol-exposed mice. The behavioral effects were associated with an up-regulation of pro-inflammatory signaling (Toll-like receptor 4, Nuclear factor-kappa B p65, Nod-like receptor protein 3, caspase-1, and Interleukin-1β), gliosis, neuronal cell death and a reduction in several structural myelin proteins (Myelin-associated glycoprotein, Myelin basic protein, Myelin proteolipid protein and Myelin Regulatory Factor) in both the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus of adult mice developmentally exposed to alcohol. Altogether, our results reveal that neuroinflammation induced by maternal binge-like alcohol consumption could contribute to myelin damage and apoptotic neurodegeneration in the offspring's brain, effects that might underlie the persistent cognitive and behavioral impairments observed in FASD.

2025, PLoS ONE

Several acoustic cues contribute to auditory distance estimation. Nonacoustic cues, including familiarity, may also play a role. We tested participants' ability to distinguish the distances of acoustically similar sounds that differed in familiarity. Participants were better able to judge the distances of familiar sounds. Electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings collected while participants performed this auditory distance judgment task revealed that several cortical regions responded in different ways depending on sound familiarity. Surprisingly, these differences were observed in auditory cortical regions as well as other cortical regions distributed throughout both hemispheres. These data suggest that learning about subtle, distance-dependent variations in complex speech sounds involves processing in a broad cortical network that contributes both to speech recognition and to how spatial information is extracted from speech.

2025, Cognitive Science

Previous research evaluating the influence of category knowledge on memory found that children, like adults, rely on category information to facilitate recall . A model that combines category and target information (Integrative) provides a superior fit to preschoolers recall data compared to a category only (Prototype) and target only (Target) model (Macias, Persaud, Hemmer, & Bonawitz, in revision). Utilizing data and computational approaches from Macias et al., (in revision), we explore whether individual and age-related differences persist in the model fits. Results revealed that a greater proportion of preschoolers recall was best fit by the Prototype model and trials where children displayed individuating behaviors, such as spontaneously labeling, were also best fit by the Prototype model. Furthermore, the best fitting model varied by age. This work demonstrates a rich complexity and variation in recall between developmental groups that can be illuminated by computationally evaluating individual differences.

2025, PLoS ONE

Despite extensive research on face perception, few studies have investigated individuals' knowledge about the physical features of their own face. In this study, 50 participants indicated the location of key features of their own face, relative to an anchor point corresponding to the tip of the nose, and the results were compared to the true location of the same individual's features from a standardised photograph. Horizontal and vertical errors were analysed separately. An overall bias to underestimate vertical distances revealed a distorted face representation, with reduced face height. Factor analyses were used to identify separable subconfigurations of facial features with correlated localisation errors. Independent representations of upper and lower facial features emerged from the data pattern. The major source of variation across individuals was in representation of face shape, with a spectrum from tall/thin to short/wide representation. Visual identification of one's own face is excellent, and facial features are routinely used for establishing personal identity. However, our results show that spatial knowledge of one's own face is remarkably poor, suggesting that face representation may not contribute strongly to self-awareness.

2025, Journal of Forensic Sciences

The noncontemporariness of speech is important to both of the two general approaches to speaker identification. Earwitness identification is one of them; in that instance, the time at which the identification is made is noncontemporary. A substantial amount of research has been carried out on this relationship and it now is well established that an auditor's memory for a voice decays sharply over time. It is the second approach to speaker identification which is of present interest. In this case, samples of a speaker's utterances are obtained at different points in time. For example, a threat call will be recorded and then sometime later (often very much later), a suspect's exemplar recording will be obtained. In this instance, it is the speech samples that are noncontemporary and they are the materials that are subjected to some form of speaker identification. Prevailing opinion is that noncontemporary speech itself poses just as difficult a challenge to the identification process as does the listener's memory decay in earwitness identification. Accordingly, series of aural-perceptual speaker identification projects were carried out on noncontemporary speech: first, two with latencies of 4 and 8 weeks followed by 4 and 32 weeks plus two more with the pairs separated by 6 and 20 years. Mean correct noncontemporary identification initially dropped to 75-80% at week 4 and this general level was sustained for up to six years. It was only after 20 years had elapsed that a significant drop (to 33%) was noted. It can be concluded that a listener's competency in identifying noncontemporary speech samples will show only modest decay over rather substantial periods of time and, hence, this factor should have only a minimal negative effect on the speaker identification process.

2025, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

To provide information about specific depositors, scent marks need to encode a stable signal of individual ownership. The highly polymorphic major histocompatibility complex (MHC) influences scents and contributes to the recognition of close kin and avoidance of inbreeding when MHC haplotypes are shared. MHC diversity between individuals has also been proposed as a primary source of scents used in individual recognition. We tested this in the context of scent owner recognition among male mice, which scent mark their territories and countermark scents from other males. We examined responses towards urine scent according to the scent owner's genetic difference to the territory owner (MHC, genetic background, both and neither) or genetic match to a familiar neighbour. While urine of a different genetic background from the subject always stimulated greater scent marking than own, regardless of familiarity, MHC-associated odours were neither necessary nor sufficient for scent owner r...

2025, Cognition & Emotion

Do people want to feel emotions that are familiar to them? In two studies, participants rated how much they typically felt various emotions (i.e., familiarity of the emotion) and how much they generally wanted to experience these emotions. We found that, in general, people wanted to feel pleasant emotions more than unpleasant emotions. However, for both pleasant and unpleasant emotions, people more (vs. less) familiar with an emotion also wanted to experience it more. Links between the familiarity of an emotion and wanting to experience that emotion were not explained by the concurrent experience of familiar emotions. Also, we show that although familiar emotions were also liked more, liking did not fully account for wanting familiar emotions. Finally, the familiarity of emotions mediated the links between trait affect and the emotions people wanted to feel. We propose that people are motivated to feel familiar emotions, in part, because of their instrumental value.

2025, Cognition and Emotion

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2025, Cortex

We investigated the mere exposure effect and the explicit memory in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients and elderly control subjects, using unfamiliar faces. During the exposure phase, the subjects estimated the age of briefly flashed faces. The mere exposure effect was examined by presenting pairs of faces (old and new) and asking participants to select the face they liked. The participants were then presented with a forced-choice explicit recognition task. Controls subjects exhibited above-chance preference and recognition scores for old faces. The AD patients also showed the mere exposure effect but no explicit recognition. These results suggest that the processes involved in the mere exposure effect are preserved in AD patients despite their impaired explicit recognition. The results are discussed in terms of Seamon et al.'s (1995) proposal that processes involved in the mere exposure effect are equivalent to those subserving perceptual priming. These processes would depend on extrastriate areas which are relatively preserved in AD patients.

2025, PLOS ONE

In reverberant rooms with multiple-people talking, spatial separation between speech sources improves recognition of attended speech, even though both the head-shadowing and interaural-interaction unmasking cues are limited by numerous reflections. It is the perceptual integration between the direct wave and its reflections that bridges the directreflection temporal gaps and results in the spatial unmasking under reverberant conditions. This study further investigated (1) the temporal dynamic of the direct-reflection-integration-based spatial unmasking as a function of the reflection delay, and (2) whether this temporal dynamic is correlated with the listeners' auditory ability to temporally retain raw acoustic signals (i.e., the fast decaying primitive auditory memory, PAM). The results showed that recognition of the target speech against the speech-masker background is a descending exponential function of the delay of the simulated target reflection. In addition, the temporal extent of PAM is frequency dependent and markedly longer than that for perceptual fusion. More importantly, the temporal dynamic of the speech-recognition function is significantly correlated with the temporal extent of the PAM of low-frequency raw signals. Thus, we propose that a chain process, which links the earlier-stage PAM with the later-stage correlation computation, perceptual integration, and attention facilitation, plays a role in spatially unmasking target speech under reverberant conditions.

2025, Revista Arete

La tuberculosis es una enfermedad de gran incidencia, provoca alteraciones en el pulmón, generando desequilibrio en la respiración. Objetivo: Determinar las características de la voz y patrón respiratorio en 6 pacientes con tuberculosis pulmonar. Metodología: Reporte de casos Resultados: Se evidenció alteración del patrón respiratorio en los 6 casos y voz disfuncional en 5 de ellos, la laringoscopia indirecta no mostro alteración en 2 de ellos. La edad y el sexo fueron las variables mas relacionadas con voz y patrón respiratorio y se encontró relación con las fases y el tiempo de tratamiento. Conclusiones: Se encontró la existencia de cambios en el patrón respiratorio que ocasionaron modificaciones en la voz que pudo ser causado por la tuberculosis pulmonar.

2025

In April 2024, IIO collaborated with the Santa Fe Institute and XPRIZE, for the workshop Animals in Translation: Imagining Criteria and Frameworks for Decoding Communication in Other Species. The two-day workshop brought together 40... more

2025

An interdisciplinary research perspective is developed concerning the question of how we understand others’ emotions and how reliable our judgment about others’ emotion can be. After an outline of the theoretical background of emotions, we briefly discuss the importance of prior experiences and context information for the recognition of emotions. To clarify this role, we describe a study design, utilizing emotional expressions and context information while controlling for prior experiences and the actual emotional situation to systematically approach these questions

2025, British Journal of Psychology

A central tenet of most current models of visual‐word recognition is that lexical units are activated on the basis of case‐invariant abstract letter representations. Here, we examined this assumption by using a unique type of words: brand names. The rationale of the experiments is that brand names are archetypically printed either in lowercase (e.g., adidas) or uppercase (e.g., IKEA). This allows us to present the brand names in their standard or non‐standard case configuration (e.g., adidas, IKEA vs. ADIDAS, ikea, respectively). We conducted two experiments with a brand‐decision task (‘is it a brand name?’): a single‐presentation experiment and a masked priming experiment. Results in the single‐presentation experiment revealed faster identification times of brand names in their standard case configuration than in their non‐standard case configuration (i.e., adidas faster than ADIDAS; IKEA faster than ikea). In the masked priming experiment, we found faster identification times of b...

2025, Behavioural brain research

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Amyloid β, a neurotoxic protein, causes disruption of hippocampal synaptic plasticity, and induces cognitive impairment in Alzheimer's disease. We previously revealed that fingolimod, a new oral immunosuppressant used to treat multiple sclerosis, ameliorates oligomeric amyloid β-induced neuronal damage via up-regulation of neuronal brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Here, we showed that oral administration of fingolimod ameliorated the impairment in object recognition memory and associative learning in mice injected with amyloid β. This effect was associated with restoration of normal BDNF expression levels in the cerebral cortices and hippocampi, suggesting that neuroprotection was mediated by up-regulation of neuronal BDNF levels. Therefore, fingolimod may provide therapeutic effects in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

2025, Vision Research

Models of categorization typically rely on the use of stimuli composed of well-defined dimensions (e.g., in Choice, decision, and measurement: Essays in honor of R. Duncan Luce, p. 251-301, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum). We apply a similar approach to the analysis of recognition memory. Using a version of short-term recognition paradigm (Sternberg, Science 153 (1966) 652), we asked whether NEMO Sternberg's, a noisy exemplar summed-similarity model, could account for variation in mean performance on individual trials. NEMO provided a very good overall fit to recognition data from three experiments. However, its failure to fit data for certain lists of stimuli suggested a revision of the summed-similarity assumption. Our model-based analysis showed that subjects used interitem similarity, in addition to probe-item similarity, as the basis for their decisions. This represents a major departure from existing recognition models that assume subjects' judgments depend exclusively on the summed similarity of the probe to the study items.

2025, Memory & Cognition

A series of experiments examined short-term recognition memory for trios of brieflypresented, synthetic human faces derived from three real human faces. The stimuli were graded series of faces, which differed by varying known amounts from the face of the average female. Faces based on each of the three real faces were transformed so as to lie along orthogonal axes in a 3-D face space. Experiment 1 showed that the synthetic faces' perceptual similarity stucture strongly influenced recognition memory. Results were fit by NEMo, a noisy exemplar model of perceptual recognition memory . The fits revealed that recognition memory was influenced both by the similarity of the probe to series items, and by the similarities among the series items themselves. Non-metric multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) showed that faces' perceptual representations largely preserved the 3-D space in which the face stimuli were arrayed. NEMo gave a better account of the results when similarity was defined as perceptual, MDS similarity rather than physical proximity of one face to another. Experiment 2 confirmed the importance of within-list homogeneity directly, without mediation of a model. We discuss the affinities and differences between visual memory for synthetic faces and memory for simpler stimuli. developed a computational model that successfully accounts for short-term recognition memory with low-dimensional stimuli, compound sinusoidal gratings whose spatial frequency and phase varied. Building on ) Generalized Context Model (GCM), Kahana and Sekuler's Noisy Exemplar Model, NEMo, combines core aspects of GCM with new key assumptions. NEMo follows the tradition of multidimensional signal-detection theory (e.g., in assuming that stimulus representations are coded in a noisy manner, with different levels of noise associated with various dimensions. NEMo augments the summed-similarity framework of item recognition (

2025, Memory & Cognition

adapted procedure to study episodic recognition memory for series of textures, which were created by linearly summing sinusoidal gratings. This adaptation made it possible to quantify and characterize interference in memory among successively presented stimuli. Unlike semantically rich stimuli, such as words or images of recognizable and nameable objects, multidimensional textures are not burdened by the complexities of extralaboratory associations, and they resist symbolic coding . Because of their well-defined, natural metric representations in a low-dimensional space , compound grating stimuli facilitate manipulation of interitem similarity relations, which are important determinants of visual episodic recognition . The availability of a natural stimulus metric for defining similarity relations among items enables detailed mathematical accounts of recognition memory to be applied to results from individual stimulus lists. Using generalized context model (GCM) as our starting point, we developed NEMO, a noisy exemplar model, which combines core aspects of GCM with significant new assumptions. First, NEMO follows the tradition of multidimensional signal detection theory (e.g., in assuming that stimulus representations are coded in a noisy manner, with a different level of noise associated with each dimension. Second, NEMO augments the summed-similarity framework of item recognition (

2025, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Using a short-term recognition memory task we evaluated the carry-over across trials of two types of auditory information: the characteristics of individual study sounds (item information), and the relationships between the study sounds (relational information). On each trial, subjects heard two successive broadband study sounds and then decided whether a subsequently presented probe sound had been in the study set. On some trials, the probe item's similarity to stimuli presented on the preceding trial was manipulated. This item information interfered with recognition, increasing false alarms from 0.4% to 4.4%. Moreover, the interference was tuned so that only stimuli very similar to each other interfered. On other trials, the relationship among stimuli was manipulated in order to alter the criterion subjects used in making recognition judgments. The effect of this manipulation was confined to the very trial on which the criterion change was generated, and did not affect the subsequent trial. These results demonstrate the existence of a sharply-tuned carry-over of auditory item information, but no carry-over of relational information.

2025, BPS Cognitive Psychology Bulletin

An overview of my career in face memory research. How do people recognise faces? I propose the islands of expertise model, which suggests that growing expertise bootstraps our abilities.

2025, Journal of Chemical Ecology

2025, Neuroscience

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by the progressive loss of memory. The neurodegeneration induced by AD has been linked to oxidative damage. However, little is known about the involvement of NADPH oxidase 2 (Nox2), a multisubunit enzyme that catalyzes the reduction of oxygen to produce reactive oxygen species, in the pathogenesis of AD. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the involvement of Nox2 in memory, in AD-related brain abnormalities, oxidative damage, inflammation and neuronal death in the hippocampus in the streptozotocin (STZ)-induced AD-like state by comparing the effects of that drug on mice lacking gp91(phox-/-) and wild-type (Wt) mice. Nox2 gene expression was found increased in Wt mice after STZ injection. In object recognition test, Wt mice injected with STZ presented impairment in short- and long-term memory, which was not observed following Nox2 deletion. STZ treatment induced increased phosphorylation of Tau a...