SNG Conference- Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand Ph.D. candidate

Simon Faghel-Soubeyrand is a Ph.D. candidat in research in cognitive neurosciences at the Université de Montréal, under the co-direction of Frédéric Gosselin (UdeM) and Ian Charest (University of Birmingham, UK). He studies perceptual and cognitive mecanisms responsible for differences in visual representations between individuals, most notably for objects and faces. He uses combinations of psychophysical techniques, cerebral imagery (electroencephalography), and automated learning tools to explore the mental representations of individuals coming from both "neurotypical" and pathological populations.

Conference abstract : 

Social behaviours are especially affected among schizophrenic individuals when accounting for the comorbidity of social anxiety disorders (SZ&SAD). Surprisingly, the mecanisms underpining facial emotion recognition - a major componant of social cognitio - are understudied in this population. Here we report our findings following a psychophysical study in which we revealed the internal visual representations (features and regions) used by SZ&SAD patients to recognize facial expressions (joy, fear, anger and neutrality). Our results show deficits in emotion recognition performance when compared to controls. The more a patient showed negative symptoms (flat affect, apathy, reduction of social interest), the greater was said deficit. It could be explained by abnormal visual representations: patients with SZ&SAD made lesser use of the fine details (higher spatial frequencies) of emotionally expressive faces, while making greater use of the coarser details (lower spatial frequencies) when compared to controls. Patients with SZ&SAD also never used the eyes (only the mouth), to recognize emotionnal expressions. We will discuss possible applications of the present results for emotion recognition training programs, and we will also explore which cerebral mecanisms could explain the observed deficits in regards to visual representations.