Wales Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology, Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd, Wales, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2018 Aug 14;13(8):e0201237. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0201237. eCollection 2018.
The human face cues a wealth of social information, but the neural mechanisms that underpin social attributions from faces are not well known. In the current fMRI experiment, we used repetition suppression to test the hypothesis that populations of neurons in face perception and theory-of-mind neural networks would show sensitivity to faces that cue distinct trait judgments. Although faces were accurately discriminated based on associated traits, our results showed no evidence that face or theory-of-mind networks showed repetition suppression for face traits. Thus, we do not provide evidence for population coding models of face perception that include sensitivity to high and low trait features. Due to aspects of the experimental design, which bolstered statistical power and sensitivity, we have reasonable confidence that we could detect effects of a moderate size, should they exist. The null findings reported here, therefore, add value to models of neural organisation in social perception by showing instances where effects are absent or small. To test the generalisability of our findings, future work should test different types of trait judgment and different types of facial stimuli, in order to further probe the neurobiological bases of impression formation based on facial appearance.
人脸提供了丰富的社会信息，但支撑从人脸进行社会归因的神经机制尚不清楚。在当前的 fMRI 实验中，我们使用重复抑制来检验以下假设：即人脸感知和心理理论神经网络中的神经元群体将对面部提示的不同特质判断表现出敏感性。尽管根据相关特征对面部进行了准确的区分，但我们的结果并未表明面部或心理理论网络对面部特征表现出重复抑制。因此，我们没有为包括对高和低特质特征敏感性的面部感知的群体编码模型提供证据。由于实验设计的某些方面增强了统计能力和敏感性，因此我们有合理的信心，如果存在中等大小的效应，我们可以检测到它们。因此，这里报告的零结果通过显示不存在或较小的效应的实例，为社会感知中的神经组织模型增加了价值。为了检验我们发现的普遍性，未来的工作应该测试不同类型的特质判断和不同类型的面部刺激，以进一步探究基于面部外观的印象形成的神经生物学基础。
