Neural and Behavioral Evidence for Infants-Samples for Students

Question: Write a Prcis Summary of a psychology research article of your choice from those available in scientific journals within the EBSCO database. Answer: The research article, Neural and Behavioral Evidence for Infants Sensitivity to Trustworthiness of faces, written by Jessen and Grossmann (2016) and published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience has been taken in the research. The research article has begun with the importance of the human face in the perception of the trustworthiness, skills, capabilities and dominance. All the human beings conduct a face evaluation, which affects their future decision-making and cooperative behavior. Most of the people decide a friend or foe, based on the facial expressions of the people. It affects the decision-making, and evaluation of the trustworthiness of a person. It is an automatic process and the person evaluated another person in a very little exposure time. The article has highlighted that the trustworthiness develops with the ability to respond to the facial expressions. The trustworthiness expressions are associated with happy facial expressions, whereas the untrustworthy behavior is associated with angry facial expressions. The children from the age of 3 categorize the faces based on the appearance and the facial expressions. The face evaluation is the technique developed during the initial years of growth. The human infants develop their cognitive skills, based on their surroundings. The article illustrates that the face evaluation is a technique, developed during the early childhood years. The human infants evaluate different social agents and develop their response towards them, based on the behavior of the social agents towards other people and certain physical attributes. Young toddlers are sensitive towards the trustworthiness; however, they are not concerned about the dominance in the personality of the social agent. The literature further illustrates that the trust evaluation is of primary importance in the survival, whereas the evaluation of the dominance requires high cognitive skills and analysis of complex and quite salient cues (Leppanen, Moulson, Vogel-Farley Nelson, 2007). Therefore, the infants show attraction towards trustworthy faces. The differences in the expressions will impact on the processing of the faces. It will impact on the response on the toddlers towards that individual. The article has obtained the primary research data through observation analysis. In this analysis 29, 7-months old infants were taken. There were 15 girls in the sample. The EEG analysis is used for the psychological evaluation. Two infants were excluded from the research study, as they failed to contribute to 10 artifact free trials. With the preferential looking paradigm, three infants were further excluded from the trial as they were not able to complete all the trials. Another inclusion criterion is that all the infants were born full-term and had a birth weight of 2500 g. The parents gave an informed consent that they agree with the research. In the research, the face stimulation was attained from one of the computer generated faces (Marzi, Righi, Ottonello, Cincotta Viggiano, 2014). The researchers have a database of the computer generated expressions with different levels of trustworthiness. These faces have been generated with FaceGen Modeller 3.2. Three male white identitie s were used, in which there was a neutral version, medium trustworthiness, and high trustworthiness. The faces with an extreme level of untrustworthiness and trustworthiness were perceived as angry and happy by the adults. The pictures were printed on a hick cardboard and shown from an equal distance to all the students. A research design encompassed the EEG experiment in which three conditions, trustworthiness, neutrality, and untrustworthiness. For each condition, total 90 faces were presented, and they were rotated in a spontaneous manner, leading to a total 270 stimuli. The order of the stimulus is randomized, which ensures that the order is not repeated more than once. A simple process was followed to conduct the experiment. First, the infants and the parents were given time to familiarize with the environment. Then the parents were required to fill a consent form. The EEG recording was prepared and the experiment took place in a sound proof chamber. The behavior of the infant was monitored with a camera mounted on the monitor. During the trial, the parents were asked to look away from the pictures, so that they do no influence the perception of the toddlers. The data collected through EEG experiment is analyzed through Matlab, and SPSS. The videos of the infant response were evaluated with the help of a rater, who was blind to the study design. The behavioral results obtained showed that the infants use to look longest at the trustworthy people. The present paper was aimed to examine the behavioral and the neural responses to facial sign of trustworthiness. The research results revealed that by the age of 7 months, infants differentiate the faces based on the trustworthiness. In the behavioral level, infants prefer to look longer at the trustworthy faces, rather than at untrustworthy faces. At the neural level, the facial trustworthiness also affects the brain response (Snyder, Webb Nelson, 2002). It means that identifying the facial cues of trustworthiness is the building block of the human face processing in early children. The current research findings further suggest that the toddlers have an excellent sensitivity to the changes in the facial expression. It also explains the development of a cognitive system in which the agents trustworthiness is evaluated with the behavioral and the facial cues. The trust evaluation is primary importance for the sustenance of the human beings. The infants looked longer at healthy faces (Jessen Grossmann, 2016). One possible explanation is that the children find that the facial expressions or the physical traits are associable. The current study sheds light on the nature and the development of the face evaluation among the toddlers and new born infants. It also states that evaluating faces based on the physical attributes and facial expressions of the social agents. The humans form intuitive impressions regarding the trustworthiness of the social agents. However, the analysis of the dominance does not initiate until the later age. References Leppanen, J. M., Moulson, M. C., Vogel-Farley, V. K., Nelson, C. A. (2007). An ERP study of emotional face processing in the adult and infant brain. Child Development, 78, 232245. Marzi, T., Righi, S., Ottonello, S., Cincotta, M., Viggiano, M. P. (2014). Trust at first sight: Evidence from ERPs. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9, 6372. Snyder, K., Webb, S. J., Nelson, C. A. (2002). Theoretical and methodological implications of variability in infant brain response during a recognition memory paradigm. Infant Behavior Development, 25, 466494. Jessen, S., Grossmann, T. (2016). Neural and behavioral evidence for infants' sensitivity to the trustworthiness of faces.Journal of cognitive neuroscience,28(11), 1728-1736.