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HUB LAB WRITING THE BOOK ON FACE-READING
By Patricia Wen
The Boston Globe
November 10, 2009

http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2009/11/10/boston_lab_explores_c
hildrens_complex_lessons_in_reading_faces

Pity the Boston car salesman who negotiated across the table from Charles A.
Nelson III, a Harvard neuroscience professor who runs the nation¹s top
laboratory studying how people learn to decode facial expressions.

As the two men faced off in the showroom last month, the salesman insisted
to Nelson that he had just offered the absolute lowest price for the German
car in question, declaring, ³This is it.¹¹

Then the salesman¹s eyes darted to a vacant corner, his nose and mouth
taking on a configuration that shouted ³Bluff.¹¹ The professor ultimately
left the dealership smiling, holding a contract to buy the car at a far
lower price, a bargain in his estimation.

Such is one ancillary benefit of Nelson¹s exhaustive research, which unfolds
every day in his $1.5 million cognitive neuroscience laboratory at
Children¹s Hospital Boston, where he studies just when and how humans learn
to read faces.

To that end, his lab recruits hundreds of babies and preschoolers from the
Boston area, with staff members making pitches at day care centers and
children¹s fairs. Using high-tech equipment to monitor the children¹s eye
movements and brain activity, researchers seek to discover how people
identify one face from another and how they decipher the emotions behind
particular expressions.

Nelson studies why some youngsters evolve to become particularly adept at
this important everyday skill that helps them distinguish Mom from a
stranger, a liar from a truth-teller, and a sad look from a fearful look,
and why others, particularly those with autism or other developmental
disorders, are often perplexed by faces, hobbling their social interactions.

His research shows that a typical child¹s face-reading skills is influenced
by experience, so he seeks to answer the question: When is the most
sensitive period for growth? The astute face-reader, he said, will always
have an edge in maintaining relationships, getting jobs, making deals, and
all other areas where the truth matters.

³What people say is not always what they mean,¹¹ said Nelson in his
sixth-floor lab a few blocks from the main hospital. ³All of us are always
looking for the match between what someone says and how they look when they
say it.¹¹

This research on infants is far from easy. Staffers blow bubbles and offer
musical toys to babies as their heads are fitted with a netting of some 64
plastic-sponge sensors that pick up electrical brain activity from different
regions of the brain. Scientists are looking to see what facial images
trigger accentuated electrical responses, showing the infant is trying to
distinguish one image from the other.

For instance, if a child¹s brain activity is the same when shown two
identical faces, though with different skin tones, it suggests the child
fails to notice skin color, Nelson said. But if the level of brain activity
changes, it suggests the child is sensitive to pigmentation.

In other studies, researchers track a baby¹s eye movements to see how they
scan certain faces and for how long.

Some babies sit perfectly still on their parent¹s lap looking at pictures
that flash on a computer screen; others are bribed with cookies to keep them
from squirming. (Parents receive a nominal $10 fee, and each child receives
a toy.)

Last Thursday, nine-month-old Grace Strano from Lexington called it quits
after about five minutes; still researchers applauded the 60 pictures she
sat through, and the data they picked up.

Nelson¹s research has yielded fascinating insights about how young brains
work. One of his major findings is that babies begin face-decoding skills
very early in life, starting around 6 months of age. Over the next several
years, children typically become captivated by faces reflecting fear, then
later they differentiate faces showing sadness, happiness, anger, surprise,
and disgust.

Through adolescence, children pick up additional subtle skills, such as
detecting anger in a slight jaw tightening, but learning has slowed down.

Nelson said that his research has revealed that by adulthood, people¹s
abilities to read faces are fairly established and they can only learn more
through deliberate learning, much like being taught a foreign language.

³By adulthood, the window is not permanently closed, but with age, it¹s
increasingly difficult to learn new abilities,¹¹ said Nelson, 56, a
high-energy researcher who travels frequently to talk about his work.

Nelson and researchers in other labs have long noted that gifted
face-readers scan faces in a holistic way, and their brains store these
facial images and associated emotions in a quickly retrievable memory bank.
If babies develop normally, they focus on another person¹s eyes, then they
take in a snapshot of the whole template of the face. Children learn to
notice how the eyes, eyebrows, nose, and mouth relate to each other,
suggesting gradations of emotion from rapture to rage. They use these images
to understand people and form relationships.

Autistic children, scientists say, typically avoid looking at other people¹s
eyes, for reasons that remain largely mysterious, depriving themselves of
the most emotion-revealing feature. Subtle changes in people¹s eyes -- the
way they squint, enlarge, or the way the eyeballs move around -- project a
wide diversity of feelings. If autistic children focus on any feature, it¹s
often the mouth.

Although most people may be wired to find face-watching a generally
pleasurable experience, Helen Tager-Flusberg, a Boston University professor
of anatomy and neurobiology who is in a joint project with Nelson, said that
autistic children¹s brains may find it too intense, even aversive. These
findings have important implications for treatments for autism, with some
therapies rewarding these children for looking directly at people¹s faces in
conversation.

Nelson¹s lab has just begun to use a new piece of high-tech infant head
gear, which will help them monitor blood flow to different regions of
babies¹ brains as they look at faces.

Nelson said he knows key brain regions are gearing up in the early months,
then go ³online¹¹ after about six months in a more specialized, efficient
way.

In a study published in Science magazine in 2002, he found that 6-month-old
infants were as good at distinguishing between similar-looking human faces
as they were similar-looking monkeys, but just a few months later became
much better at human faces. Nelson interpreted the results to mean that,
after 6 months of age, babies begin the process of trying to ³become
expert¹¹ at the faces they need for survival.

Children¹s skills are deeply affected by their exposures: If they are of
French ancestry, but raised in Kenya, they may specialize in discerning
African faces in their daily environment, not white ones.

Nelson said negative experience can also have an impact. Children who have
been abused by their parents, researchers say, often show an exceptional
ability to detect anger based on the most split-second changes in
expressions.

Nelson said he believes his own face-reading abilities come from a childhood
fascination with faces, as well as his decades of research. He insisted,
however, that motivated adults can learn to read faces better by paying more
attention to faces. But he said these subtleties are not easy and may not
always have one interpretation.

Referring to the controversial ³Hope¹¹ poster, showing a picture of
President Obama looking up, Nelson said, ³How do we know the difference
between contemplation and spaciness?¹¹

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Published by David Sunfellow
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