时 间：2016年5月19日（星期四）下午3:00-5:00
地 点：心理学院5楼报告厅
题 目： Multimodal Investigations of Face Processing and Social Attention
主讲人：王硕博士（加州理工学院）
主讲人简介：
王硕，美国加州理工学院博士后。本科毕业于新加坡国立大学计算神经学专业，博士毕业于加州理工学院计算与神经系统专业，师从Ralph Adolphs教授。运用多种认知神经学方法，包括心理物理学，眼动，脑电，核磁共振，人脑单细胞记录，以及自闭症人群和杏仁核损伤病人，在面孔处理（face processing）以及社会注意（social attention）领域有多项研究成果。在Neuron， PNAS，SCAN等国际重要期刊发表论文，是Journal of Neuroscience，Scientific Reports等期刊的审稿人。
讲座内容：
In this talk, first I will discuss face processing in the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). I will show that single neurons in the human amygdala encode subjective judgment of emotions instead of physical stimulus properties. With a combination of single-neuron recordings, fMRI, and amygdala lesion patients, I will further show that the amygdala parametrically encodes both emotion intensity and ambiguity. With a combination of EEG and fMRI, I will show that a late positive potential, the LPP, differentiates levels of ambiguity, and is specifically associated with behavioral judgments of ambiguity rather than mere perception of ambiguous stimuli.
People with autism have social difficulties and show altered attention to, and preferences for specific categories of visual information. In the second half of the talk, I will discuss two social attentional deficits in people with autism: (1) Using a comprehensive saliency model and eye tracking to quantify the relative contributions of each image feature to visual saliency, I will show that people with autism demonstrate atypical bottom-up spontaneous visual attention across multiple levels and categories of objects. (2) Using a goal-directed visual search task, in which target saliency varies trial-by-trial according to search instruction, I will show that people with autism have reduced attention to target-congruent search items, especially for social targets, suggesting a top-down attentional deficit.
In conclusion, using multimodal cognitive neuroscience methods, I will present how different aspects of facial emotions are encoded in the amygdala and ACC, and illustrate both bottom-up and top-down attentional deficits in autism. I will also discuss the link between the amygdala function and autism.