Young infants are typically thought to prefer looking at smiling expressions. Although some accounts suggest that the preference is automatic and universal, we hypothesized that it is not rigid and may be influenced by other face dimensions, most notably the face’s gender. Infants are sensitive to the gender of faces; for example, 3-month-olds raised by female caregivers typically prefer female over male faces. We presented neutral versus smiling pairs of faces from the same female or male individuals to 3.5-month-old infants (n = 25), controlling for low-level cues. Infants looked longer to the smiling face when faces were female but longer to the neutral face when faces were male, i.e., there was an effect of face gender on the looking preference for smiling. The results indicate that a preference for smiling in 3.5-month-olds is limited to female faces, possibly reflective of differential experience with male and female faces.
This study uses representational similarity-based neural decoding to test whether semantic information elicited by words and pictures is encoded in functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data. In experiment 1, subjects passively viewed eight audiovisual word and picture stimuli for 15 min. Blood oxygen levels were measured using the Hitachi ETG-4000 fNIRS system with a posterior array over the occipital lobe and a left lateral array over the temporal lobe. Each participant's response patterns were abstracted to representational similarity space and compared to the group average (excluding that subject, i.e., leave-one-out cross-validation) and to a distributional model of semantic representation. Mean accuracy for both decoding tasks significantly exceeded chance. In experiment 2, we compared three group-level models by averaging the similarity structures from sets of eight participants in each group. In these models, the posterior array was accurately decoded by the semantic model, while the lateral array was accurately decoded in the between-groups comparison. Our findings indicate that semantic representations are encoded in the fNIRS data, preserved across subjects, and decodable by an extrinsic representational model. These results are the first attempt to link the functional response pattern measured by fNIRS to higher-level representations of how words are related to each other.
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