Biomedical subjects

Agnes Volein

Publications and source records attributed to Agnes Volein.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2004

Maternal personality and infants' neural and visual responsivity to facial expressions of emotion.

BACKGROUND: Recent investigations suggest that experience plays an important role in the development of face processing. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential role of experience in the development of the ability to process facial expressions of emotion. METHOD: We examined the potential role of experience indirectly by investigating the relationship between the emotional environment provided by mothers (as indexed by affective measures of their personality) and 7-month-olds' processing of emotional expressions (as indexed by visual attention and event-related potentials [ERPs]). RESULTS: For positive emotion, infants with highly positive mothers looked longer at fearful than happy expressions, and a subset of these infants who themselves also scored highly on positive temperament showed a larger negative central (Nc) component in the ERP to fearful than happy faces. For negative emotion, there were no detectable influences of maternal personality, although very fearful infants showed a larger Nc to fearful than happy expressions over the right hemisphere. CONCLUSION: To the extent that these variations in maternal disposition reflect variations in their expression of positive facial expressions, these results suggest that the emotional environment experienced by infants contributes to the development of their responses to facial expressions.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Face-sensitive cortical processing in early infancy.

BACKGROUND: Debates about the developmental origins of adult face processing could be directly addressed if a clear infant neural marker could be identified. Previous research with infants remains open to criticism regarding the control stimuli employed. METHODS: We recorded ERPs from adults and 3-month-old infants while they watched faces and matched visual noise stimuli. RESULTS: We observed similar amplitude enhancement for faces in the infant N290 and adult N170. In contrast, the infant P400 showed only a latency effect, making it unlikely to be the main precursor of the adult N170. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that there is some degree of specificity of cortical processing of faces as early as 3 months of age.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Basic-level category discriminations by 7- and 9-month-olds in an object examination task.

This study examines 7- and 9-month-olds' ability to categorize cats as separate from dogs, and dogs as separate from cats in an object examination task. In Experiment 1, 7- and 9-month-olds (N = 30) familiarized with toy cat replicas were found to form a category of cat that included novel cats but excluded a dog and an eagle. In Experiment 2, 7- and 9-month-olds (N = 30) familiarized with toy dog replicas were found to form a category of dog that included a novel dogs and a novel cat but excluded an eagle. These results mirror those of 3- to 4-month-olds tested with visual preference methods and stand in contrast to previously reported object examination results. Analyses of the distribution of features in the exemplars used to familiarize infants suggest that, like the 3- to 4-month-olds, the 7- and 9-month-olds in these studies form categories within the task, and on the basis of feature distributions.

Concept Formation↗