Facial expressions

Attentional preference for social stimuli, such as different facial expressions, is an important part of the development of humans' behavioral and emotional health. Infants demonstrate a predilection for faces and tend to sustain visual attention over non-social stimuli immediately after birth and throughout infancy. Infants begin to identify facial expressions and emotions around the age of 6 to 8 months. Studies have shown that the amygdala plays an important role in infants' attentional bias towards faces and fear processing. The goal of this study was to examine how infants’ amygdala mean

…old baby will reliably respond to facial expressions, smiling back at her caretaker or older sibling. But what if that same baby had been deprived of her early visual experience? Will she be able to appropriately respond to seemingly mundane interactions, such as a peer’s facial expression, if she begins seeing at the age of 10? My work is part of Project Prakash, a dual humanitarian/scientific mission to identify and treat curably blind children in India and then study how their brain learns to make sense of the v

…a rich repertoire of vocalizations, facial expressions, and gestures. Great ape gestural repertoires are particularly elaborate, with ape species employing over 80 different gesture types intentionally: that is towards a recipient with a specific goal in mind. Intentional usage allows us to ask not only what information is encod

Body motion is a fundamental signal of social communication. This includes facial as well as full-body movements. Combining advanced methods from computer animation with motion capture in humans and monkeys, we synthesized highly-realistic monkey avatar models. Our face avatar is perceived by monkeys as almost equivalent to a real animal, and does not induce an ‘uncanny valley effect’, unlike all other previously used avatar models in studies with monkeys. Applying machine-learning methods for the control of motion style, we were able to investigate how species-specific shape and dynamic cues