The dialects theory of cross-cultural communication suggests that due to culture-specific characteristics in the expression of emotion, we can recognise own-culture emotional expressions more accurately than other-culture emotional expressions. This effect is suggested to occur due to the nonconvergent social evolution that takes place in different geographical regions. Based on the evolutionary value of own-culture social signals, previous research has suggested that own-culture emotional expressions can be appraised without conscious awareness. The current study tested this hypothesis. We developed, validated, and made open access what is to our knowledge the first labelled, multicultural facial stimuli set, including freely expressed and Facial Action Coding System instructed emotional expressions. We assessed emotional recognition and cultural familiarity responses during brief backward-masked presentations in British participants. We found that emotional recognition and cultural familiarity were higher for own-culture faces. A Bayesian analysis of face-detection and emotional-recognition performance revealed that faces were not processed subliminally. Further analysis of awareness, using hits (correct detection/recognition) and misses (incorrect detection/recognition), showed that face-detection hits were a necessary condition for reporting higher familiarity for own-culture faces. These findings suggest that the own-culture emotional recognition advantage is preserved under conditions of backwards masking and that the appraisal of cultural familiarity involves conscious awareness.
The theory of universal emotions suggests that certain emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise and happiness can be encountered cross-culturally. These emotions are expressed using specific facial movements that enable human communication. More recently, theoretical and empirical models have been used to propose that universal emotions could be expressed via discretely different facial movements in different cultures due to the non-convergent social evolution that takes place in different geographical areas. This has prompted the consideration that own-culture emotional faces have distinct evolutionary important sociobiological value and can be processed automatically, and without conscious awareness. In this paper, we tested this hypothesis using backward masking. We showed, in two different experiments per country of origin, to participants in Britain, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore, backward masked own and other-culture emotional faces. We assessed detection and recognition performance, and self-reports for emotionality and familiarity. We presented thorough cross-cultural experimental evidence that when using Bayesian assessment of non-parametric receiver operating characteristics and hit-versus-miss detection and recognition response analyses, masked faces showing own cultural dialects of emotion were rated higher for emotionality and familiarity compared to other-culture emotional faces and that this effect involved conscious awareness.
Attention and working memory (WM) are core components of executive functions, and they can be enhanced by training. One activity that has shown to improve executive functions is musical training, but the brain networks underlying these improvements are not well known. We aimed to identify, using functional MRI (fMRI), these networks in children who regularly learn and play a musical instrument. Girls and boys aged 10–13 with and without musical training completed an attention and WM task while their brain activity was measured with fMRI. Participants were presented with a pair of bimodal stimuli (auditory and visual) and were asked to pay attention only to the auditory, only to the visual, or to both at the same time. The stimuli were afterward tested with a memory task in order to confirm attention allocation. Both groups had higher accuracy on items that they were instructed to attend, but musicians had an overall better performance on both memory tasks across attention conditions. In line with this, musicians showed higher activation than controls in cognitive control regions such as the fronto-parietal control network during all encoding phases. In addition, facilitated encoding of auditory stimuli in musicians was positively correlated with years of training and higher activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus and the left supramarginal gyrus, structures that support the phonological loop. Taken together, our results elucidate the neural dynamics that underlie improved bimodal attention and WM of musically trained children and contribute new knowledge to this model of brain plasticity.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common neuropsychiatric disorder in which children present prefrontal cortex (PFC) related functions deficit. Proactive cognitive control is a process that anticipates the requirement of cognitive control and crucially depends on the maturity of the PFC. Since this process is important to ADHD symptomatology, we here test the hypothesis that children with ADHD have proactive cognitive control impairments and that these impairments are reflected in the PFC oscillatory activity. We recorded EEG signals from 29 male children with ADHD and 25 typically developing (TD) male children while they performed a Go-Nogo task, where the likelihood of a Nogo stimulus increased while a sequence of consecutive Go stimuli elapsed. TD children showed proactive cognitive control by increasing their reaction time (RT) concerning the number of preceding Go stimuli, whereas children with ADHD did not. This adaptation was related to modulations in both P3a potential and lateral prefrontal theta oscillation for TD children. Children with ADHD as a group did not demonstrate either P3a or theta modulation. But, individual variation in theta activity was correlated with the ADHD symptomatology. The results depict a neurobiological mechanism of proactive cognitive control impairments in children with ADHD.
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