Papers by Beatrice de Gelder
Research on social threat has shown influences of various factors, such as agent characteristics,... more Research on social threat has shown influences of various factors, such as agent characteristics, proximity and social interaction on social threat perception. An important, yet understudied aspect of threat experience concerns the ability to exert control over the thread. In this study, we used a Virtual Reality (VR) environment showing an approaching avatar that was either angry (threatening body expression) or neutral (neutral body expression) and informed participants to stop avatars from coming closer under five levels of control success (0, 25, 50, 75, or 100%) when they felt uncomfortable. Behavioral results revealed that social threat triggered faster reactions at a greater virtual distance from the participant than the neutral avatar. Event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed that the angry avatar elicited a larger N170/vertex positive potential (VPP) and a smaller N3 than the neutral avatar. The 100% control condition elicited a larger late positive potential (LPP) than the...
Cognitive Contributions to the Perception of Spatial and Temporal Events, 1999
The perception of facial and vocal emotions is an essential part of the communicative competence ... more The perception of facial and vocal emotions is an essential part of the communicative competence upon which complex social interactions are based. The investigation of simultaneous emotional processing in more than one modality represents a new field of research for cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists alike who can start from these bimodal situations to study the behavioral and anatomical basis of this particular multimodal integration. The purpose of the present chapter is to present a review of the experimental work from a behavioural and electrophysiological perspective. We argue that integration of the emotion presented concurrently in the face and the voice is mandatory, automatic and not under attentional control. At the electro-physiological level, it produces an early negative component with a centro-frontal topography, entirely compatible with the properties of the well-studied mismatch negativity component. Audiovisual emotion perception certainly requires further research to bring some new lights on the questions raised by the results available these days.
Neuropsychologia, 2007
Exposure to incongruent auditory and visual speech produces both visual recalibration and selecti... more Exposure to incongruent auditory and visual speech produces both visual recalibration and selective adaptation of auditory speech identification. In an earlier study, exposure to an ambiguous auditory utterance (intermediate between /aba/ and /ada/) dubbed onto the video of a face articulating either /aba/ or /ada/, recalibrated the perceived identity of auditory targets in the direction of the visual component, while exposure to congruent non-ambiguous /aba/ or /ada/ pairs created selective adaptation, i.e. a shift of perceived identity in the opposite direction [
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2008
In daily life, we perceive a person's facial reaction as part of the natural environment surround... more In daily life, we perceive a person's facial reaction as part of the natural environment surrounding it. Because most studies have investigated how facial expressions are recognized by using isolated faces, it is unclear what role the context plays. Although it has been observed that the N170 for facial expressions is modulated by the emotional context, it was not clear whether individuals use context information on this stage of processing to discriminate between facial expressions. The aim of the present study was to investigate how the early stages of face processing are affected by emotional scenes when explicit categorizations of fearful and happy facial expressions are made. Emotion effects were found for the N170, with larger amplitudes for faces in fearful scenes as compared to faces in happy and neutral scenes. Critically, N170 amplitudes were significantly increased for fearful faces in fearful scenes as compared to fearful faces in happy scenes and expressed in left-occipito-temporal scalp topography differences. Our results show that the information provided by the facial expression is combined with the scene context during the early stages of face processing.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2007
Prosopagnosia is a deficit in face recognition in the presence of relatively normal object recogn... more Prosopagnosia is a deficit in face recognition in the presence of relatively normal object recognition. Together with older lesion studies, recent brain-imaging results provide evidence for the closely related representations of faces and objects and, more recently, for brain areas sensitive to faces and bodies. This evidence raises the issue of whether developmental prosopagnosics may also have an impairment in encoding bodies. We investigated the first stages of face, body, and object perception in four developmental prosopagnosics by comparing event-related potentials to canonically and upside-down presented stimuli. Normal configural encoding was absent in three of four developmental prosopagnosics for faces at the P1 and for both faces and bodies at the N170 component. Our results demonstrate that prosopagnosics do not have this normal processing routine readily available for faces or bodies. A profound face recognition deficit characteristic of developmental prosopagnosia may ...
Neuroscience Letters, 2000
General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public port... more General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.-Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research-You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain-You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright, please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.
Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2010
Recent studies of monkeys and humans have identified several brain regions that respond to bodies... more Recent studies of monkeys and humans have identified several brain regions that respond to bodies. Researchers have so far mainly addressed the same questions about bodies and bodily expressions that are already familiar from three decades of face and facial expression studies. Our present goal is to review behavioral, electrophysiological and neurofunctional studies on whole body and bodily expression perception against the background of what is known about face perception. We review all currently available evidence in more detail than done so far, but we also argue for a more theoretically motivated comparison of faces and bodies that reflects some broader concerns than only modularity or category specificity of faces or bodies.
NeuroReport, 2000
Intermodal binding between affective information that is seen as well as heard triggers a mandato... more Intermodal binding between affective information that is seen as well as heard triggers a mandatory process of audiovisual integration. In order to track the time course of this audiovisual binding, event related brain potentials were recorded while subjects saw facial expression and concurrently heard auditory fragment. The results suggest that the combination of the two inputs is early in time (110 ms post-stimulus) and translates as a speci®c enhancement in amplitude of the auditory N1 component. These ®ndings are compatible with previous functional neuroimaging results of audiovisual speech showing strong audiovisual interactions in auditory cortex in the form of magnetic response ampli®cations, as well as with electrophysiological studies demonstrating early audiovisual interactions (before 200 ms post-stimulus). Moreover, our results show that the informational content present in the two modalities plays a crucial role in triggering the intermodal binding process. NeuroReport 11:1329±1333 & 2000 Lippincott
Language and Cognitive Processes, 1998
Journal of Vision, 2010
Abstract Prosopagnosia is a severe impairment in identifying faces that has been associated with ... more Abstract Prosopagnosia is a severe impairment in identifying faces that has been associated with deficits in configural face processingperceiving relations among facial features. Prosopagnosia can result from post-natal occipito-temporal damage (APacquired ...
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2000
General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public port... more General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.-Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research-You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain-You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright, please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2000
Behavioral studies indicate a right hemisphere advantage for processing a face as a whole and a l... more Behavioral studies indicate a right hemisphere advantage for processing a face as a whole and a left hemisphere superiority for processing based on face features. The present PET study identifies the anatomical localization of these effects in well-defined regions of the middle fusiform gyri of both hemispheres. The right middle fusiform gyrus, previously described as a face-specific region, was found to be more activated when matching whole faces than face parts whereas this pattern of activity was reversed in the left homologous region. These lateralized differences appeared to be specific to faces since control objects processed either as wholes or parts did not induce any change of activity within these regions. This double dissociation between two modes of face processing brings new evidence regarding the lateralized localization of face individualization mechanisms in the human brain.
Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology, 2014
The auditory oddball response has been found to be of predictive value for neurologic outcome at ... more The auditory oddball response has been found to be of predictive value for neurologic outcome at the early stages of coma. In the present study, the auditory oddball response was examined longitudinally during the recovery from the vegetative state to consciousness. This response was repeatedly examined every 2 weeks for an average period of 3.5 months in severely brain-injured patients. Results showed that amplitude of the auditory oddball response was unrelated to the behavioral changes during the patients' recovery from the vegetative state to consciousness. However, the presence and size of a negative potential at about 350 milliseconds predicted behavioral outcome, both for the short and long term (2 to 3 years after injury). Practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2008
Background: Integration of information from multiple sensory sources is an important prerequisit... more Background: Integration of information from multiple sensory sources is an important prerequisite for successful social behavior, especially during face‐to‐face conversation. It has been suggested that communicative impairments among individuals with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) might be caused by an inability to integrate synchronously presented visual and auditory cues.Method: We investigated audiovisual integration of speech stimuli among a group of high‐functioning adult PDD individuals and age‐ and IQ‐matched controls using electroencephalography, measuring both early pre‐phonological, as well as late phonologically driven integration.Results: Pre‐phonological AV interactions are intact, while AV interactions corresponding to more complex phonological processes are impaired in individuals with PDD.Conclusions: The present findings argue for a pattern of impairments on tasks related to complex audiovisual integration combined with relative sparing of low‐level int...
Cerebral Cortex, 2005
Electrophysiological and hemodynamic correlates of processing isolated faces have been investigat... more Electrophysiological and hemodynamic correlates of processing isolated faces have been investigated extensively over the last decade. A question not addressed thus far is whether the visual scene, which normally surrounds a face or a facial expression, has an influence on how the face is processed. Here we investigated this issue by presenting faces in natural contexts and measuring whether the emotional content of the scene influences processing of a facial expression. Event-related potentials were recorded to faces (fearful/neutral) embedded in scene contexts (fearful/neutral) while participants performed an orientation-decision task (face upright or inverted). Two additional experiments were run, one to examine the effects of context that occur without a face and the other to evaluate the effects of faces isolated from contexts. Faces without any context showed the largest N170 amplitudes. The presence of a face in a fearful context enhances the N170 amplitude over a face in neutral contexts, an effect that is strongest for fearful faces on left occipito-temporal sites. This N170 effect, and the corresponding topographic distribution, was not found for contexts-only, indicating that the increased N170 amplitude results from the combination of face and fearful context. These findings suggest that the context in which a face appears may influence how it is encoded.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2012
In matters of the mind, the opposition between what is mind-made or inside and natural or outside... more In matters of the mind, the opposition between what is mind-made or inside and natural or outside the mind is bound to misfire. Lindquist et al. build their analysis on a strong contrast between naturalism, which they reject, and psychologism, which they endorse. We challenge this opposition and indicate how adopting psychologism to combat a naturalistic view of emotional mind/brain areas is self-defeating. We briefly develop the alternative view of emotions as mental organs.
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Papers by Beatrice de Gelder