Cognitive Representation of Facial Motion: Investigation of Normal and Impaired Cross-Feature Integration

在我的D.Phil中，我想测试我们整合面部特征信息的能力是否会影响我们身份表征的稳定性。尽管之前没有人探索过这一点，但我假设，我们能够整合动态面部信息的程度决定了我们身份匹配能力的速度和准确性。明确地说，我认为通过成功整合跨特征运动学习的身份表征比没有这种整合的学习的身份表征更稳定。在这个假设下，健康的参与者应该能够形成更稳定的身份表征，他们可以为其整合跨特征的信息，而不是他们没有这样做的身份表征。反过来，我认为ASD参与者在这两种情况下都不会表现出稳定性方面的好处--鉴于他们没有体验到虚幻的减速效应，我假设他们在不同特征之间整合运动的能力将受到损害。当然，为了确保跨特征整合与表征构建有因果关系，而不仅仅是相关，我们应该进行一项先导研究。我认为，改变参与者可以从跨特征整合中获得好处的程度，应该可以预测结果表征的稳定性。这样的初步发现将支持这样一种观点，即虚幻减速是我们整合跨特征运动信息能力的代理。一旦建立了这个代理，初始设置应该是一项行为研究，探索健康参与者配对身份视觉搜索表现的RG稳定性的差异。随后，我们应该比较NTS和ASDS表示的稳定性。

In my D.Phil, I would like to test if our ability to integrate information across facial features influences the stability of our identity representations. Though this has not been explored previously, I hypothesize that the degree to which we are able to integrate dynamic facial information dictates the speed and accuracy of our identity-matching ability. Explicitly, I imagine that representations of identities learnt through successful integration of cross-feature movement are more stable than those learnt without such integration.Under this assumption, healthy participants should be able to form more stable representations of identities for which they integrate information across features than of identities for which they do not. In turn, I suggest that ASD participants would not show a stability benefit in either case - given that they do not experience an illusory slowing effect, I hypothesize their ability to integrate motion across features to be impaired.Of course, to ensure that integrating across features is causally involved with representation building and not merely correlated, we ought to conduct a pilot study. I suggest that varying the degree to which participants can derive a benefit of cross-feature integration should predict the stability of a resulting representation. Such initial finding would strengthen the argument that illusory slowing serves as a proxy of our ability to integrate motion information across features.Once this proxy is established, an initial setup ought to be a behavioural study exploring differences in RG stability for paired-identity visual search performance of healthy participants. Subsequently, we should compare stability of NTs' and ASDs' representations.