Nelson – learning difficulties

We’ve been focusing on one aspect of face recognition for a number of years that specifically is concerned with how babies develop the ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion. And I should add that the way I got interested in this was working with children in Camp Towe, which is in Haliburton, Ontario, who had learning disabilities. And what occurs commonly among many children with learning disabilities are these sort of deficits in social communication. They sometimes just don’t know how to read a facial expression to know what you’re feeling. And so from that I sort of developed an interest in trying to understand what the ontogeny would be of that ability. That is, its origins. And so we’ve been looking at from the time when kids are just a few months of age and we wait a few months because their vision isn’t very good and this requires fairly good vision to look at subtle changes in the face, through about four or five years, changes in the child’s ability to recognize different facial expressions.  

What factors influence that. So an example of the latter is that in our Bucharest early intervention project we’re looking at emotion recognition in our institutionalized children because we think that the areas of the brain that we know are involved in recognizing emotion, the medulla would be one, which is again a structure deep in the brain very near the hippocampus in the middle, someplace in here, and another area called the orbital frontal cortex, which basically, if I can put this back together, is in the frontal lobe, right behind your eye, so right behind here. Those are the areas that we know are critically involved in recognizing facial expressions.     

We think those areas may have gone awry, based on these early institutionalized experiences and that these children might not show typical developmental profiles in recognizing emotion. Now actually we’re showing that they are pretty normal in that respect. It may simply be that we haven’t looked at them long enough, that is, these are babies who are only a year or a year-and-a-half. It may be that by the time they’re four or five they’ll show differences, but right now they seem to be ok. So the focus there is to chart the development of this, and one of the things we’ve observed is that babies are very good at discriminating happy from any other facial expression. They can do that by the time they’re a couple of weeks old. But they’re not very good at discriminating negative expressions like fear from angry until they’re well past a year of age. The other surprising thing is that, for babies anyway, if you give them a choice between looking at fear and happy, or fear and anything, they always look more at fear. They’re never upset by it, they just prefer it. We think that’s important because fear is a very important emotion.  

And so we think they have this sort of built-in apparatus that makes them gravitate to fear because it sends a signal that there could be danger in this situation. So again, probably when they get older they would be upset by it, possibly, but when they’re younger they just look more at it. And because of that, sometimes they don’t show evidence of discriminating fear from another expression because they’re so glued to fear they’re not even looking at the other expression.    

So that’s one of the interesting observations we’ve made as we’ve gone along. And of course, again, the implications for this have to do with kids with learning disabilities, children with neurodevelopmental problems like autism or Williams syndrome, which are genetic disorders in some respects, where we know that these children show deficits sometimes in recognizing facial expressions. What’s particularly problematic for kids with autism is that if language is also delayed, then they can’t communicate very well linguistically and that means they also can’t communicate very well non-verbally. So that gives them a real deficit in social communication.