A Study of the Computational Space of Facial Expressions of Emotion

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Project Summary Past research has been very successful in defining how facial expressions of emotion are produced, including which muscle movements create the most commonly seen expressions. These facial expressions of emotion are then interpreted by our visual system. Yet, little is known about how these facial expressions are recognized. The overarching goal of this proposal is to define the form and dimensions of the cognitive (computational) space used in this visual recognition. In particular, this proposal will study the following three hypotheses: Although facial expressions are produced by a complex set of muscle movements, expressions are generally easily identified at different spatial and time resolutions. However, it is not know what these limits are. Our first hypothesis (H1) is that recognition of facial expressions of emotion can be achieved at low resolutions and after short exposure times. In Aim 1, we define experiments to determine how many pixels and milliseconds (ms) are needed to successfully identify different emotions. The fact that expressions of emotion can be recognized quickly at low resolution indicates that simple features robust to image manipulation are employed. Our second hypothesis (H2) is that the recognition of facial expressions of emotion is partially accomplished by an analysis of configural features. Configural cues are known to play an important role in other face recognition tasks, but their role in the processing of expressions of emotion is not yet well understood. Aim 2 will identify a number of these configural cues. We will use real images of faces, manipulated versions of these face images, and schematic drawings. It is also known that shape features play a role in facial expressions (e.g., the curvature of the mouth in happiness). In Aim 3, we define a shape-based computational model. Our hypothesis (H3) is that the configural and shape features are defined as deviations from a mean (or norm) face as opposed to being described as a set of independent exemplars (Gnostic neurons). The importance of this computational space is not only to further justify the results of the previous aims, but to make new predictions that can be verified with additional experiments with human subjects.