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Adaptation aftereffects offer a critical window onto sensory processing in the brain. However, such sensory processing is hierarchical, progressing from the extraction of simple features to the representation of complex patterns. The way that adaptation depends on coordinated changes across different levels of the hierarchy has been studied. However, when a given adapting stimulus produces both a low- and a high-level aftereffect, it remains unclear whether the high-level aftereffect is a passive reflection of low-level adaptation, or whether it is generated, at least partially, de novo in high-level areas. We assembled the two key ingredients needed for investigating this question psychophysically. One ingredient involves perceptual tasks that depend rather exclusively on low or high levels of processing, and yet involve partially identical stimuli that inspire cross-level adaptation. For this, we considered the discrimination of curvature or facial expression using curves or cartoon faces. The other ingredient is spatial or temporal stimulus manipulations that limit adaptation to either low or high levels. For this, we used crowding and brief presentations. We found that crowding an adapting curve with flanking curves reduces the curvature aftereffect much more than the facial-expression aftereffect, and vice versa for crowding the adapting face with flanking faces. Additionally, reducing adaptation time to a cartoon face diminishes the curvature aftereffect more drastically than the facial-expression aftereffect. These results suggest that high-level aftereffects, even when generated by a low-level adaptor, are not completely inherited from lower levels, and offer a window into the determining factors.

These findings provide important evidence for ABM as a potentially effective protective tool for temperamentally at-risk children in a developmental window before the emergence of clinical disorder and open to prevention and intervention. Clinical trial registration information-Attention and Social Behavior in Children (BRAINS); http://clinicaltrials.gov/; NCT02401282.

Evidence that culture modulates on-line neural responses to the emotional meanings encoded by vocal and facial expressions was demonstrated recently in a study comparing English North Americans and Chinese (Liu et al., 2015). Here, we compared how individuals from these two cultures passively respond to emotional cues from faces and voices using an Oddball task. Participants viewed in-group emotional faces, with or without simultaneous vocal expressions, while performing a face-irrelevant visual task as the EEG was recorded. A significantly larger visual Mismatch Negativity (vMMN) was observed for Chinese vs. English participants when faces were accompanied by voices, suggesting that Chinese were influenced to a larger extent by task-irrelevant vocal cues. These data highlight further differences in how adults from East Asian vs. Western cultures process socio-emotional cues, arguing that distinct cultural practices in communication (e.g., display rules) shape neurocognitive activity associated with the early perception and integration of multi-sensory emotional cues.

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This article reports two ERP studies that exploited the classifier system of Mandarin Chinese to investigate semantic prediction. In Mandarin, in certain contexts, a noun has to be preceded by a classifier, which has to match the noun in semantically-defined features. In both experiments, an N400 effect was elicited in response to a classifier that mismatched an up-coming predictable noun, relative to a matching classifier. Among the mismatching classifiers, the N400 effect was graded, being smaller for classifiers that were semantically related to the predicted word, relative to classifiers that were semantically unrelated to the predicted word. Given that the classifier occurred before the predicted word, this result shows that fine-grained semantic features of nouns can be pre-activated in advance of bottom-up input. The studies thus extend previous findings based on a more restricted range of highly grammaticalized features such as gender or animacy in Indo-European languages (Szewczyk & Schriefers, 2013; Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005; Wicha, Bates, Moreno, & Kutas, 2003).

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