title: Automatic Change Detection to Facial Expressions in Adolescents: Evidence from Visual Mismatch Negativity Responses.
abstract: Adolescence is a critical period for the neurodevelopment of social-emotional processing, wherein the automatic detection of changes in facial expressions is crucial for the development of interpersonal communication. Two groups of participants (an adolescent group and an adult group) were recruited to complete an emotional oddball task featuring on happy and one fearful condition. The measurement of event-related potential was carried out via electroencephalography and electrooculography recording, to detect visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) with regard to the automatic detection of changes in facial expressions between the two age groups. The current findings demonstrated that the adolescent group featured more negative vMMN amplitudes than the adult group in the fronto-central region during the 120-200 ms interval. During the time window of 370-450 ms, only the adult group showed better automatic processing on fearful faces than happy faces. The present study indicated that adolescent's posses stronger automatic detection of changes in emotional expression relative to adults, and sheds light on the neurodevelopment of automatic processes concerning social-emotional information.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Tongran
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Natural Language Processing Laboratory, College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University Liaoning, China.
authors.forename: Tong
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Xiao
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of SciencesBeijing, China; Department of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg UniversityAalborg, Denmark.
authors.forename: Jiannong
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Shi
keywords: ERPs; adolescence; automatic change detection; facial expression perception; visual mismatch negativity