TALK: SPEAKER Chiara Fiorentini "Perceiving facial expressions. Insights from normal population and autism"

We are incredibly fluent in perceiving emotions from facial expressions and this ability plays an important role in our everyday social interactions. However, the exact cognitive mechanisms underlying this ability are still unclear. In my talk, I will focus on a few studies in which I have addressed some outstanding issues on the way we perceive facial expressions, namely: 1) the existence of categorical perception for facial expression, 2) the relative weight of configural and component-­based cues in emotion recognition, 3) the role of expressive components in the identification of naturally unfolding facial expressions. Lastly, I will present some recent findings on facial expression recognition in families of children with autism, a condition in which face and expression processing atypicalities have been extensively documented.

Person Perception Seminars : ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders