Social brain 5

Women baby face

lacking physical power and assertiveness

Man baby face

less aggressive, approachable and lighter crime sentence

Occipital face area (OFA)

specialized for faces (upright and inverted), codes physical aspects of facial stimuli (80/20 to 51/49)

Fusiform face area (FFA)

Specialized for faces (only upright), codes an invariant facial identity (e.g. recognize same face in sun or shadow), active when judging Face ID (49/51)

Superior temporal sulcus (STS)

Responds to faces and body, combines visual + auditory information, important for action perception (e.g. lip movements) and dynamic stimuli, active when judging eye gaze

STS experiments

(e.g. arrow + eye gaze experiment, single cell recordings in monkeys STS sensitive to gaze direction and lesions affect gaze cueing, lip smack sound + vision STS most active, STS monkeys highest activation when watching someone reach toward objects while paying attention to reach

Cognitive model of face processing (applies to familiar and unfamiliar faces)

Detecting emotional expression of faces, detecting eye gaze, facial speech analysis (e.g. lip movements), separate route for unfamiliar faces (direct visual processing), prosopagnosia damages face recognition units

Neural model of face perception

Core mechanism (specialized for faces) and extended system (face processing of general cognitive mechanisms e.g. emotion, language, action)

Pointing

Protodeclarative: i want that (difficulties in autism)

Protoimperative: look at that

Big five

Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism (or emotional stability)

Competency

Halo effect (experiment teaching acting cold vs warm)

Personality experiment

People rated own personality traits. Women face: extraversion, male face: extraversion, openness to experiences and neuroticism

Trustworthiness

More feminine, older, upturned lips, people who look like us. Untrustworthiness activates right insula and bilateral amygdala)

Agression/dominance

Width-hight-ratio (ice hockey and US presidents leadership)

Beautiful = good

averageness, symmetry, sexual dimorphism

sexual dimorphism

Females less attracted to masculinity and man more attracted to high femininity

Why we infer traits from faces

Grain of truth, self-fulfilling prophecies, using expressions on cues to make trait inferences, culturally generated stereotypes little/no objective basis