Lecture Notes 17/02/22

Emotion processing: gaze and arousal mechanisms

Objectives

1. Gain familiarity with prevailing and novel accounts of atypical emotion processing in autism.
2. Understand methodological problems associated with the study of typical and atypical socioemotional processing.
3. Understand how to derive research questions and hypotheses from theory to experiment design and become familiarised with relevant analytical approaches.

Introduction of Autism

The Autism Triade

1. Impairments in social interaction and communication;
2. Repetitive and restricted patterns of behaviour;
3. Lack of socio-emotional reciprocity, impaired emotion

Fast-track modulator model

1. Fast pathway for face detection, tuned to low spatial frequency
2. Subcortical route
3. support biases to faces even in newborns

Atypical gaze

For atypical gaze

• Reduced orientation or increased gaze aversion.
• Gaze contingent paradigms.
• Hyperarousal to direct eye-contact.
• Blunt arousal correlates with reduced orientation.

Against atypical gaze

• Either no support for atypical gaze or atypical gaze was not necessarily predictive of accuracy.
• Frequency tagging + eyetracking – similar neural dynamics.
• Meta-analysis.

Summary

1. Gaze and physiological mechanisms underlying socioemotional processing in autism are highly heterogeneous.
2. Methodological factors: task, context, analytical approaches, measures.
3. Individual differences and comorbidity (e.g., alexithymia, anxiety).
4. Different theoretical approaches (normative models vs. developmental models, individual difference models).

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Neuroscience of perception and imagery

Objectives

1. Phenomenological continuum of sensory experience
2. Neurobiology of imagery and perception
3. Theoretical models

sensory experience

1. Perception
2. Phenomenological
3. continuum
4. Imagery
5. Volitional
6. Pareidolia
7. Illusion
8. Hallucination
9. Metamorphopsia
10. Eidetic imagery
11. Afterimage
12. Synaesthesia
13. Pseudohallucination
14. Flashback imagery

Veridical percept:

External; outside voluntary control; vivid

Imagery percept:

Mind’s eye; volitional; vague

Some phenomena: Dream, Illusion, Pareidolia, Hallucination, Clinical illusions: Metamorphopsia, Eidetic imagery, After image, Synaesthesia, Pseudohallucination, Flashback imagery

Perception and imagery are different and happens in different brain areas.

The perception occurs in occipital lobe. The imaginary occurs in frontal parietal

Question: What if the abstract idea can be understood if one lack the ability for imaginary?

Answer: Ture, you can still make a prediction.

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Running a neurotech company

Tip 1: Embrace academic interdisciplinarity

Tip 2: Look before you leap

Tip 3: Advanced academic leaning is a great training ground for entrepreneurs and leader just be sure to step out of the “Ivory tower”

Tip 4: Find a real world problem to solve

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Watermark (an update for the blog)

Every time I finish writing an article, I can run python3 watermark.py postname to add a watermark. If I want to add a watermark to all articles in the first run, I can run python3 watermark.py all

Vocabularies

alexithymia: the inability to recognize or describe one’s own emotions.

Prevailing: existing at a particular time; current; popular

comorbidity: the simultaneous presence of two or more diseases or medical conditions in a patient.

Perception: the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses.

Imagery: visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work.