Faces communicate a wealth of information, including cues to others’ internal emotional states. Face processing is often studied using static stimuli; however, in real life, faces are dynamic. The current project examines face detection and emotion recognition from isolated motion cues. Across two studies, facial motion is presented in point-light displays (PLDs), in which moving white dots against a black screen correspond to dynamic regions of the face. In Study 1, adults were asked to identify the upright facial motion of five basic emotional expressions (e.g., surprise) and five neutral non-rigid movements (e.g., yawning) versus inverted and scrambled distractors. Prior work with static stimuli finds that certain cues, including the addition of motion information, the spatial arrangement of elements, and the emotional significance of stimuli affect face detection. This study found significant effects involving each of these factors using facial PLDs. Notably, face detection was most accurate in response to face-like arrangements, and motion information was useful in response to unusual point configurations. These results suggest that similar processes underlie the processing of static face images and isolated facial motion cues. In Study 2, children and adults were asked to match PLDs of emotional expressions to their corresponding labels (e.g., match a smiling PLD with the word “happy”). Prior work with face images finds that emotion recognition improves with age, but the developmental trajectory depends critically on the emotion to be recognized. Emotion recognition in response to PLDs improved with age, and there were different trajectories across the five emotions tested. Overall, this dissertation contributes to the understanding of the influence of motion information in face processing and emotion recognition, by demonstrating that there are similarities in how people process full-featured static faces and isolated facial motion cues in PLDs (which lack features). The finding that even young children can detect emotions from isolated facial motion indicates that features are not needed for making these types of social judgments. PLD stimuli hold promise for future interventions with atypically developing populations.

Social functioning impairments are a core, debilitating, and treatment refractory feature of schizophrenia. The mechanisms contributing to these impairments are unknown. Cognitive control mechanisms, mediated by the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), are known to influence response to interpersonal stressors in healthy individuals, thus impairments in these processes may contribute to social deficits. Deficits in cognitive control and lateral prefrontal abnormalities are well-documented in schizophrenia, but the relationship between these deficits and social interactions has received limited attention in the literature. The current dissertation presents a systematic examination of the contribution of the behavioral and neural mechanisms of cognitive control to social functioning impairments in schizophrenia. Three papers are presented. / Psychology

This thesis examines the representation of disabled people in Western culture within the context of feminist theoretical analyses to compare images of disabled people with the representations of women's bodies that are found in cultural representations. The body of the thesis is comprised of six chapters which explore images of disability in six major cultural sites for such images: charitable advertising, popular women's magazines, literature for children, film, biblical narratives and pornography. My analysis of these sites suggests that there are parallels between the ways in which women's bodies and the bodies of disabled people are represented. In Chapter 1 I analyse the discourse of charity advertising and the ways in which it presents disabled people in feminised scenarios. In Chapter 2 I examine the ways in which disability is allied to gender in popular women's magazines where certain bodily specificities and disabilities are associated with female characters. I consider in Chapter 3 the ways in which disabled characters in literature for children are presented as morally inadequate and lacking in self-control, exactly as female characters are depicted in Western culture. In Chapter 4 I address the identity of disability in film as a construction and in some respects as an illusion, as well as the role of disabled characters in the Freudian narrative of psycho-sexual development, and equate this with the role of the female in cultural expressions. In Chapter 5 I examine the cures of the New Testament and the ritual purifications of the Old Testament as a means to eradicate difference from the ideal of the male body. I argue that biblical narrative establishes women and disabled people as a violation of the ideal male body through their categorisation as unclean. In Chapter 6 I analyse pornographic representations of disabled women to investigate the ways in which disabled characters are positioned, like female characters, as the object of the gaze and as such as castrated and fetishised figures. The Conclusion summarises the argument of the thesis and briefly analyses some of the issues that arise around general concerns about the representation of disability.

According to many philosophers and scientists, human sociality is explained by our unique capacity to ‘share’ the mental states of others and to form collective intentional states. Collective intentionality has been widely debated in the past two decades, focusing especially on the issue of its reducibility to individual intentionality and the place of collective intentions in the natural realm. It is not clear, however, to what extent these two issues are related, and what methodologies of investigation are appropriate in each case. In this thesis I set out a theory of the naturalization of collective intentionality that draws a line between naturalizability arguments and theories of collective intentionality naturalized. The former provide reasons for believing in the naturalness of collective intentional states based on our commonsense understanding of them; the latter offer responses to the ontological question about the existence and identity of collective as distinct from individual intentionality. This model is naturalistic because it holds that the only way to establish the place of mental entities in the order of things is through the theory and practice of science. After reviewing naturalizability arguments in philosophy, I consider an influential research program in the cognitive sciences. On the account that I present, the irreducibility of collective intentionality can be derived from a theory of human development in scientific psychology dealing with phenomena of sociality like communication, recently refined by Michael Tomasello.

Impairments in aspects of social cognition have been found in children who have experienced maltreatment; however, the long-term impact of childhood maltreatment on social cognition is less well understood. This study examined areas of social cognition that may be associated with poor psychological, social, and emotional outcomes in adults who have experienced intra-familial childhood maltreatment. In a sample of university students (N = 68), childhood maltreatment was associated with social cognitive impairment in two models of emotional intelligence (EI), trait EI and ability EI, and advanced theory of mind (ToM). Higher frequency and severity of specific subtypes of childhood maltreatment predicted lower trait EI, ability EI, and ToM. In particular, neglect predicted lower ToM and ability EI scores. Psychological abuse alone predicted lower trait EI while physical abuse was not a significant predictor for any of the social-cognitive variables. Further, the data showed maternal vs. paternal maltreatment predicted specific social cognitive outcomes. Understanding the relationship between social cognitive deficits and intra-familial maltreatment may guide clinical and community assessment and treatment approaches, as well as provide information on the pervasive and continuing impact of childhood maltreatment. / February 2017

<p>Making decisions is fundamental to everything we do, yet it can be impaired in various disorders and conditions. While research into the neural basis of decision-making has flourished in recent years, many questions remain about how decisions are instantiated in the brain. Here we explored how primates make abstract decisions and decisions in social contexts, as well as one way to non-invasively modulate the brain circuits underlying decision-making. We used rhesus macaques as our model organism. First we probed numerical decision-making, a form of abstract decision-making. We demonstrated that monkeys are able to compare discrete ratios, choosing an array with a greater ratio of positive to negative stimuli, even when this array does not have a greater absolute number of positive stimuli. Monkeys’ performance in this task adhered to Weber’s law, indicating that monkeys—like humans—treat proportions as analog magnitudes. Next we showed that monkeys’ ordinal decisions are influenced by spatial associations; when trained to select the fourth stimulus from the bottom in a vertical array, they subsequently selected the fourth stimulus from the left—and not from the right—in a horizontal array. In other words, they begin enumerating from one side of space and not the other, mirroring the human tendency to associate numbers with space. These and other studies confirmed that monkeys’ numerical decision-making follows similar patterns to that of humans, making them a good model for investigations of the neurobiological basis of numerical decision-making. </p><p>We sought to develop a system for exploring the neuronal basis of the cognitive and behavioral effects observed following transcranial magnetic stimulation, a relatively new, non-invasive method of brain stimulation that may be used to treat clinical disorders. We completed a set of pilot studies applying offline low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to the macaque posterior parietal cortex, which has been implicated in numerical processing, while subjects performed a numerical comparison and control color comparison task, and while electrophysiological activity was recorded from the stimulated region of cortex. We found tentative evidence in one paradigm that stimulation did selectively impair performance in the number task, causally implicating the posterior parietal cortex in numerical decisions. In another paradigm, however, we manipulated the subject’s reaching behavior but not her number or color comparison performance. We also found that stimulation produced variable changes in neuronal firing and local field potentials. Together these findings lay the groundwork for detailed investigations into how different parameters of transcranial magnetic stimulation can interact with cortical architecture to produce various cognitive and behavioral changes.</p><p>Finally, we explored how monkeys decide how to behave in competitive social interactions. In a zero-sum computer game in which two monkeys played as a shooter or a goalie during a hockey-like “penalty shot” scenario, we found that shooters developed complex movement trajectories so as to conceal their intentions from the goalies. Additionally, we found that neurons in the dorsolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex played a role in generating this “deceptive” behavior. We conclude that these regions of prefrontal cortex form part of a circuit that guides decisions to make an individual less predictable to an opponent.</p> / Dissertation

<p>Humans are natural politicians. We obsessively collect social information that is both observable (e.g., about third-party relationships) and unobservable (e.g., about others’ psychological states), and we strategically employ that information to manage our cooperative and competitive relationships. To what extent are these abilities unique to our species, and how did they evolve? The present dissertation seeks to contribute to these two questions. To do so, I take a comparative perspective, investigating social decision-making in humans’ closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees. In Chapter 1, I review existing literature on theory of mind—or the ability to understand others’ psychological states—in these species. I also present a theoretical framework to guide further investigation of social cognition in bonobos and chimpanzees based on hypotheses about the proximate and ultimate origins of their species differences. In Chapter 2, I experimentally investigate differences in the prosocial behavior of bonobos and chimpanzees, revealing species-specific prosocial motivations that appear to be less flexible than those exhibited by humans. In Chapter 3, I explore through decision-making experiments bonobos’ ability to evaluate others based on their prosocial or antisocial behavior during third-party interactions. Bonobos do track the interactions of third-parties and evaluate actors based on these interactions. However, they do not exhibit the human preference for those who are prosocial towards others, instead consistently favoring an antisocial individual. The motivation to prefer those who demonstrate a prosocial disposition may be a unique feature of human psychology that contributes to our ultra-cooperative nature. In Chapter 4, I investigate the adaptive value of social cognition in wild primates. I show that the recruitment behavior of wild chimpanzees at Gombe National Park, Tanzania is consistent with the use of third-party knowledge, and that those who appear to use third-party knowledge receive immediate proximate benefits. They escape further aggression from their opponents. These findings directly support the social intelligence hypothesis that social cognition has evolved in response to the demands of competing with one’s own group-mates. Thus, the studies presented here help to better characterize the features of social decision-making that are unique to humans, and how these abilities evolved.</p> / Dissertation

The aim of this experiment was to study whether completing a questionnaire either related or unrelated to various aspects of the workplace could induce different implicit and explicit stereotypic associations with Down syndrome. Subjects read one of three questionnaires before completing a task designed to measure implicit associations. The task consisted of photo primes of faces belonging to individuals with Down syndrome and typically developing individuals, followed by an evaluative decision task with adjectives related to the stereotype dimensions of warmth and competence. Following the implicit task, participants were asked directly about their associations between Down syndrome and each of the target traits. It was hypothesized that Down syndrome would be systematically associated with low competence, regardless of the context primed, but that it would be associated with greater warmth when morale-related aspects of the workplace were primed than when efficiency-related aspects of the workplace were primed. These hypotheses were not supported, and questionnaire type did not seem to prime specific associations in the implicit task. However, consistent with past research, Down syndrome was associated with high ratings of warmth on the explicit measure, and implicit results suggest Down syndrome may be implicitly associated with greater warmth as well. Methodological limitations of the study are discussed, as well as possible directions for future research.

Child abuse and neglect is a significant social issue with long term consequences for affected children and young people, including increased risk of emotional and social difficulties. Models of the impacts of maltreatment outline a developmental process in which maltreating parent-child relationships affect the development of neural networks, which in turn undermine developing cognitive processes, including emotion regulation and social understanding, thereby increasing risk of emotional and social difficulties. This study explores a subset of these cognitive processes in a sample of adolescents in long-term out-of-home care as a result of maltreatment, relative to a sample of non-maltreated peers, including situation selection (conditioned avoidance and risk-taking), attentional deployment (attention biases and attention control) and cognitive change (interpretation bias), as well as aspects of social understanding (mentalising, emotion understanding and prosocial responding). Further, the relative effects of maltreatment factors, and the relationship between emotion regulation and social understanding with adolescent adjustment was also explored. Results demonstrated maltreatment-related effects in conditioned avoidance, risk-taking, attention processes and social understanding, and explored the relative effect of exposure to physical abuse on the development of these processes, differences in such processes did not appear to significantly predict poor or normative adjustment of maltreated adolescents. These results are discussed with respect to models of maltreatment, emotion regulation and social understanding, with implications for the development and implementation of interventions.

Facial motion provides an abundance of information necessary for mediating social communication. Emotional expressions, head rotations and eye-gaze patterns allow us to extract categorical and qualitative information from others (Blake & Shiffrar, 2007). Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterised by a severe impairment in social cognition. One of the causes may be related to a fundamental deficit in perceiving human movement (Herrington et al., 2007). This hypothesis was investigated more closely within the current thesis. In neurotypical controls, the visual processing of facial motion was analysed via EEG alpha waves. Participants were tested on their ability to discriminate between successive animations (exhibiting rigid and nonrigid motion). The appearance of the stimuli remained constant over trials, meaning decisions were based solely on differential movement patterns. The parieto-occipital region was specifically selective to upright facial motion while the occipital cortex responded similarly to natural and manipulated faces. Over both regions, a distinct pattern of activity in response to upright faces was characterised by a transient decrease and subsequent increase in neural processing (Girges et al., 2014). These results were further supported by an fMRI study which showed sensitivity of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) to perceived facial movements relative to inanimate and animate stimuli. The ability to process information from dynamic faces was assessed in ASD. Participants were asked to recognise different sequences, unfamiliar identities and genders from facial motion captures. Stimuli were presented upright and inverted in order to assess configural processing. Relative to the controls, participants with ASD were significantly impaired on all three tasks and failed to show an inversion effect (O'Brien et al., 2014). Functional neuroimaging revealed atypical activities in the visual cortex, STS and fronto-parietal regions thought to contain mirror neurons in participants with ASD. These results point to a deficit in the visual processing of facial motion, which in turn may partly cause social communicative impairments in ASD.