Where and when to look: Understanding emotional face perception in frontotemporal dementia
Rosalind
Hutchings1, 2, 3*,
Romina
Palermo3, 4,
Jason
Bruggemann1, 5,
John
R.
Hodges1, 2, 3,
Olivier
Piguet1, 2, 3 and
Fiona
Kumfor1, 2, 3
-
1
Neuroscience Research Australia, Australia
-
2
The University of New South Wales, School of Medical Sciences, Australia
-
3
ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Australia
-
4
The University of Western Australia, School of Psychology, Australia
-
5
The University of New South Wales, School of Psychiatry, Australia
Faces offer an incredible wealth of information for social interactions. Emerging evidence suggests that some clinical groups (e.g., autism) who show impaired emotion recognition do not attend appropriately to parts of the face that display emotion (e.g., the eyes). The behavioural-variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is a younger-onset dementia syndrome affecting the frontal and/or temporal lobes. Clinically, this disorder is characterised by changes in social behaviour and personality. Existing evidence has shown that bvFTD patients have deficits in labelling facial expressions. Whether inappropriate facial scanning patterns contribute to impaired facial expression recognition in bvFTD is unknown. Here, we employed remote eye-tracking to investigate whether bvFTD patients show different patterns of facial scanning compared to healthy controls. Seventeen bvFTD participants and 17 healthy controls were presented with 8 fearful, 8 happy and 8 neutral faces over 9 blocks (3 blocks per emotion) with 72 trials in total. Eye-tracking data were recorded while participants passively viewed each face for 3 seconds. Analyses revealed that bvFTD patients spent a significantly longer dwell time on the whole face (F(1,32) = 18.25, p < 0.001) and on the eyes (F(1,32) = 5.39, p = 0.05) compared to healthy, age-matched controls. Dwell time on the mouth did not differ between groups (F(1,32) = 0.004, p < 0.95). These results indicate that despite looking at the ‘right’ areas of the face, bvFTD patients appear unable to interpret emotional cues when decoding facial expressions. Our results provide impetus for further investigation into where a breakdown may be occurring in face and emotion processing in bvFTD.
Keywords:
Dementia,
Eye-tracking,
face perception,
Frontal Lobe,
social cognition
Conference:
ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Sydney, Australia, 2 Dec - 4 Dec, 2015.
Presentation Type:
Oral Presentation
Topic:
Psychophysiology
Citation:
Hutchings
R,
Palermo
R,
Bruggemann
J,
Hodges
JR,
Piguet
O and
Kumfor
F
(2015). Where and when to look: Understanding emotional face perception in frontotemporal dementia.
Conference Abstract:
ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.219.00048
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Received:
21 Oct 2015;
Published Online:
30 Nov 2015.
*
Correspondence:
Ms. Rosalind Hutchings, Neuroscience Research Australia, Randwick, New South Wales, Australia, r.hutchings@neura.edu.au