Graduate Seminar - “Parameter-specific morphing of faces and voices: Perspectives for social neuroscience and applications"

25.06.2019 14:00 – 18:00

“Parameter-specific morphing of faces and voices: Perspectives for social neuroscience and applications”

The goal of this Graduate Seminar is to discuss how parameter-specific morphing and caricaturing techniques can enhance our understanding of the role of sensory information for the processing of social and affective signals from faces and voices.
An initial talk by Prof. Stefan Schweinberger will introduce concepts and research using parameter-specific morphing technology in the context of social, cognitive and affective neuroscience. Visual (image) morphing technology was introduced around 1990 by Benson and Perrett, and auditory morphing was pioneered about ten years later by Kawahara. Today, these techniques can be used not only to precisely control sensory information in faces and voices (e.g., by interpolating between an average identity and a specific person, or between a neutral emotional expression and a specific emotion), but also to enhance (“caricature”) specific social signals by extrapolation. Importantly, this can be done selectively for independent parameters, or sources of variation (e.g., the 3D shape of facial landmarks in metric coordinates versus the texture properties in terms of skin reflectance, colouration and pigmentation). The introductory talk provides examples for how using this technology has enhanced our understanding of the sensory bases for processing social and affective signals, and for various applications of these methods to improve social perception and interaction in specific populations.
Following the lecture, Dr. Rafal Skiba will present FACSGen and some of the research he conducted using this software developed by CISA to generate facial expressions of emotion.
The talks will be followed by a discussion of related relevant topics, such as
(1) the strengths and limitations of these and other existing methods to precisely control social information in experimental stimuli,
(2) how these methods could improve social interactions, or contribute to diagnose/understand social interaction impairments,
(3) how virtual reality can contribute to social neuroscience, and
(4) which target populations (e.g. individuals with vision or hearing impairment, autism, stroke…) could potentially benefit from such technology, and how.

14:00 – 15:00 Introductory lecture (Stefan Schweinberger)
15:00 – 15:15 Research presentation (Rafal Skiba)
15:15 – 15:30 Coffee break
15:30 – 16:40 Discussions by group
16:40 – 17:00 Coffee break
17:00 – 18:00 Large group discussion

Relevant articles (attached):

The role of shape versus texture information for learning and recognizing faces (Itz et al., 2014, NeuroImage).
Caricaturing as a general method for improving poor face perception (Dawel et al., 2018, JEP: Applied)
Improving face perception in macular degeneration patients (Lane et al., 2018,Scientific Reports)
Parameter-specific morphing in voice perception (Skuk & Schweinberger, 2014)
Dynamic facial expressions of emotion signals over time (Jack, Garrod & Schyns 2014)

Lieu

Bâtiment: Campus Biotech

H8.01 D

entrée libre