Autor:in:
Marina A. Pavlova, Tübingen (Germany)
Veridical social cognition (perception and understanding of social properties of others such as intentions, drives, emotions, and dispositions) is of tremendous value for a variety of daily life activities. Both essential components of social cognition, body language reading and face processing, are impaired in a wide range of neurological, psychiatric, psychosomatic and neurodevelopmental disorders. Yet there is a paucity of reliable and easily applicable tests for face processing examination in clinical settings. Recently a new experimental tool for studying face tuning has been proposed (Pavlova et al., 2015-2018). For this task, a set of food-plate images composed of food ingredients was created in a manner bordering slightly on the style of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–1593), an Italian painter best known for fascinating imaginative portraits composed entirely of fruits, vegetables, plants, and flowers. The primary advantage of Face-n-Food images is that single components do not explicitly trigger face-specific processing: face tuning occurs spontaneously without being explicitly cued by face elements such as eyes or mouth. We applied the Face-n-Food paradigm in patients with autistic spectrum disorders, depression, schizophrenia, Williams und Down syndrome (Kubon et al., 2019; Pavlova et al., 2015-2018; Rolf et al., 2018). The outcome shows that performance on the Face-n-Food task is rather different in these conditions: (i) a number of patients who completely failed on the task; (ii) thresholds for face tuning; and (iii) face recognition dynamics. Furthermore, comparison of findings in young autistic patients (10-18 years old) in Italy and Germany points to substantial cultural modulation of face tuning not only in health (Pavlova et al., 2018), but also in atypical development. Further clarification of origins and nature of aberrant face sensitivity including differences in dynamic topography of the underwriting brain networks in all these disorders speaks for specially tailored brain imaging work.
References:
Kubon J, Fallgatter AJ, Pavlova MA. (2019). Soziale Kognition bei Depression: das neue Face-n-Food-Paradigma. Poster to be presented at DGPPN 2019.
Pavlova MA, Guerreschi M, Tagliavento L, Gitti F, Sokolov AN, Fallgatter AJ, Fazzi EM. (2017). Social cognition in autism: face tuning. Sci Rep (Nature Publishing Group) 7: 2734.
Pavlova MA, Heiz J, Sokolov AN, Barisnikov K. (2016a). Social cognition in Williams Syndrome: face tuning. Frontiers Psychology: Frontiers in Emotion Science 7: 1131.
Pavlova MA, Heiz J, Sokolov AN, Fallgatter AJ, Barisnikov K. (2018a). Even subtle cultural differences affect face tuning. PLoS ONE 13(6): e0198299.
Pavlova MA, Mayer A, Hösl F, Sokolov AN (2016b). Faces on her and his mind: female and likable. PLoS ONE 11(6): e0157636.
Pavlova MA, Scheffler K, Sokolov AN (2015). Face-n-Food: Gender differences in tuning to faces. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0130363.
Pavlova MA, Galli J, Pagani F, Micheletti S, Guerreschi M, Sokolov AN, Fallgatter AJ, Fazzi EM. (2018b). Social Cognition in Down Syndrome: Face Tuning in Face-Like Non-Face Images. Front Psychol.9: 2583.
Rolf R, Fallgatter AJ, Pavlova MA. (2018). Soziale Kognition bei Schizophrenie: Gesichtstuning bei der Face-n-Food-Aufgabe. Poster presented at DGGPN 2018.