Affiliation: York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Talk Title: Let’s face it: probing primates’ ability to decode facial expressions
Seminars are now offered as hybrid in-person meetings.
Physical Location: Abramsky Hall Room 002
Zoom Link
Sli.do lin
Abstract:
Facial expression recognition is a core component of human social interaction, relying on complex visual features to convey emotional cues. Like any other vision-based task, to recognize the message conveyed by facial expressions, our sophisticated visual system must first process these sensory cues, facilitating flexible downstream readouts that could support a wide range of social behaviours. However, for autistic individuals, certain facets of this process appear to diverge, leading to notable differences in emotion interpretation and social engagement. How can we do basic neuroscientific studies of the face and facial expression-related behaviours and their underlying mechanism to address these variations at a level precise enough to inform improved diagnostic markers and potential interventions? Can we build a macaque model to study the underlying mechanisms of human facial expression judgment? Can we leverage the latest developments in AI to develop a closed loop between AI and system neuroscience to benefit autism research? In this talk, I will discuss the progress made so far in our lab to this end and our path ahead.
