Behind the faces: Alzheimer’s disease and emotional blindness

Behind the faces: Alzheimer's disease and emotional blindness.

F ace emotional recognition (FER), empathy, emotional inference, decision-making, theory of mind are some of the various aspects of social cognition 1. FER is involved in other aspects of social cognition and its impairment would interfere in the performance of other components of the social network. The six emotions commonly studied are: happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear and sadness. T...

Magnesium and Alzheimers Disease: The Cholinergic Hypothesis

The cholinergic deficit in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) remains the cornerstone for the understanding of chemical signal transfer. Hypofunctions of cholinergic systems are significantly involved in the signs and symptoms of senile dementia of the Alzheimer type. Cognitive deficits in AD have been widely associated with dysfunction of the cholinergic system. As a diagnostic marker of AD the activity...

Emotional Faces and Cognition

Emotional faces and the default mode network.

The default-mode network (DMN) of the human brain has become a central topic of cognitive neuroscience research. Although alterations in its resting state activity and in its recruitment during tasks have been reported for several mental and neurodegenerative disorders, its role in emotion processing has received relatively little attention. We investigated brain responses to different categori...

Attention to faces: a change-blindness study.

What strategies does human vision use to attend to faces and their features? How are such strategies altered by 2-D inversion or photographic negation? We report two experiments in which these questions were studied with the flicker task of the change-blindness literature. In experiment 1 we studied detection of configural changes to the eyes or mouth, and found that upright faces receive more ...