The Effects of Negative Emotions on Mental Representation of Faces
Face detection is an initial step of many social interactions involving a comparison between a visual input and a mental representation of faces, built from previous experience. Whilst emotional state was found to affect the way humans attend to faces, little research has explored the effects of emotions on the mental representation of faces. Here, we examined the specific perceptual modulation of geometric properties of the mental representations associated with state anxiety and state depression on face detection, and to compare their emotional expression. To this end, we used an adaptation of the reverse correlation technique inspired by Gosselin and Schyns’, (2003) ‘Superstitious Approach’, to construct visual representations of observers’ mental representations of faces and to relate these to their mental states. In two sessions, on separate days, participants were presented with ‘colourful’ noise stimuli and asked to detect faces, which they were told were present. Based on the noise fragments that were identified as faces, we reconstructed the pictorial mental representation utilised by each participant in each session. We found a significant correlation between the size of the mental representation of faces and participants’ level of depression. Our findings provide a preliminary insight about the way emotions affect appearance expectation of faces. To further understand whether the facial expressions of participants’ mental representations reflect their emotional state, we are conducting a validation study with a group of naïve observers who are asked to classify the reconstructed face images by emotion. Thus, we assess whether the faces communicate participants’ emotional states to others.
Analogy and Spatial Cognition: How and Why they matter for STEM learning
Space is the universal donor for relations" (Gentner, 2014). This quote is the foundation of my talk. I will explore how and why visual representations and analogies are related, and why. I will also explore how considering the relation between analogy and spatial reasoning can shed light on why and how spatial thinking is correlated with learning in STEM fields. For example, I will consider children’s numbers sense and learning of the number line from the perspective of analogical reasoning.