Neural mechanism of facial expression perception in intellectually gifted adolescents.
The current study investigated the relationship between general intelligence and the three stages of facial expression processing. Two groups of adolescents with different levels of general intelligence were required to identify three types of facial expressions (happy, sad, and neutral faces), which were presented with either inverted or upright orientation. Participants' response times and accuracy were measured and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to evaluate neural dynamic processes. The behavioral results showed that high IQ adolescents exhibited shorter response times than average IQ adolescents during the facial expression identification task. The electrophysiological responses showed that no significant IQ-related differences were found for P1 responses during the early visual processing stage. During the middle processing stage, high IQ adolescents had faster structural encoding of inverted faces (shorter N170 latencies) compared to their average IQ peers, and they also showed better structural encoding of sad faces, with larger vertex positive potential (VPP) amplitudes than for neutral faces. During the late processing stage, adolescents with high IQ showed better attentional modulation, with larger late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes compared to adolescents with average IQ. The current study revealed that adolescents with different intellectual levels used different neural dynamic processes during these three stages in the processing of facial expressions.
Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China. Electronic address: liutr@psych.ac.cn.
Tongran
T
Liu
Natural Language Processing Laboratory, College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Liaoning 110819, China.
Tong
T
Xiao
Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
Xiaoyan
X
Li
Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; Department of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University, Denmark. Electronic address: shijn@psych.ac.cn.
Jiannong
J
Shi
D000293:Adolescent; D001288:Attention; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual; D005149:Facial Expression; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D014796:Visual Perception
Adolescents; Event-related potentials; Facial expression perception; General intelligence