Psychology Department, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca, Spain; Department of Clinical and Movement Neurosciences, Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK.
Department of Clinical and Movement Neurosciences, Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK.
Cortex. 2022 Jun;151:176-187. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2022.03.003. Epub 2022 Mar 26.
For more than a century it has been proposed that visceral and vasomotor changes inside the body influence and reflect our experience of the world. For instance, cardiac rhythms (heartbeats and consequent heart rate) reflect psychophysiological processes that underlie our cognition and affective experience. Yet, considering that we usually infer what others do and feel through vision, whether people can identify the most likely owner of a given bodily rhythm by looking at someone's face remains unknown. To address this, we developed a novel two-alternative forced-choice task in which 120 participants watched videos showing two people side by side and visual feedback from one of the individuals' heartbeats in the centre. Participants' task was to select the owner of the depicted heartbeats. Across five experiments, one replication, and supplementary analyses, the results show that: i) humans can judge the most likely owner of a given sequence of heartbeats significantly above chance levels, ii) that performance in such a task decreases when the visual properties of the faces are altered (inverted, masked, static), and iii) that the difference between the heart rates of the individuals portrayed in our 2AFC task seems to contribute to participants' responses. While we did not disambiguate the type of information used by the participants (e.g., knowledge about appearance and health, visual cues from heartbeats), the current work represents the first step to investigate the possible ability to infer or perceive others' cardiac rhythms. Overall, our novel observations and easily adaptable paradigm may generate hypotheses worth examining in the study of human and social cognition.
一个多世纪以来，人们一直认为体内的内脏和血管变化会影响和反映我们对世界的体验。例如，心脏节律（心跳和随之而来的心率）反映了我们认知和情感体验的心理生理过程。然而，考虑到我们通常通过视觉来推断他人的行为和感受，人们是否可以通过观察一个人的面部来识别给定身体节律最有可能的所有者，目前还不得而知。为了解决这个问题，我们开发了一种新颖的二选一强制选择任务，在这个任务中，120 名参与者观看了并排显示两个人的视频，以及一个人心脏跳动的中心视觉反馈。参与者的任务是选择所描述心跳的所有者。在五个实验、一个复制和补充分析中，结果表明：i）人类可以判断给定心跳序列最有可能的所有者，明显高于随机水平，ii）当改变面部的视觉属性（倒置、掩蔽、静态）时，这种任务的表现会下降，iii）在我们的 2AFC 任务中所描绘的个体的心率差异似乎会影响参与者的反应。虽然我们没有明确参与者使用的信息类型（例如，关于外貌和健康的知识，心跳的视觉线索），但目前的工作代表了调查推断或感知他人心脏节律的可能性能力的第一步。总的来说，我们新的观察结果和易于适应的范式可能会产生值得在人类和社会认知研究中检验的假设。
