@article {5006, title = {Early concepts of intimacy: Young humans use saliva sharing to infer close relationships}, journal = {Science}, volume = {375}, year = {2022}, month = {01/2022}, pages = {311 - 315}, abstract = {

Across human societies, people form {\textquotedblleft}thick{\textquotedblright} relationships characterized by strong attachments, obligations, and mutual responsiveness. People in thick relationships share food utensils, kiss, or engage in other distinctive interactions that involve sharing saliva. We found that children, toddlers, and infants infer that dyads who share saliva (as opposed to other positive social interactions) have a distinct relationship. Children expect saliva sharing to happen in nuclear families. Toddlers and infants expect that people who share saliva will respond to one another in distress. Parents confirm that saliva sharing is a valid cue of relationship thickness in their children{\textquoteright}s social environments. The ability to use distinctive interactions to infer categories of relationships thus emerges early in life, without explicit teaching; this enables young humans to rapidly identify close relationships, both within and beyond families.

}, issn = {0036-8075}, doi = {10.1126/science.abh1054}, url = {https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abh1054}, author = {Thomas, Ashley J. and Woo, Brandon and Nettle, Daniel and Elizabeth S Spelke and Rebecca Saxe} } @proceedings {5155, title = {Reasoning about the antecedents of emotions: Bayesian causal inference over an intuitive theory of mind}, volume = {44}, year = {2022}, month = {07/2022}, pages = {854-861}, address = {Toronto, CA}, abstract = {It is commonly believed that expressions visually signal rich diagnostic information to human observers. We studied how observers interpret the dynamic expressions that people spontaneously produced during a real-life high-stakes televised game. We find that human observers are remarkably poor at recovering what events elicited others{\textquoteright} facial and bodily expressions. Beyond simple inaccuracy, people{\textquoteright}s causal reasoning exhibits systematic model-based patterns of errors. We show that latent emotion representations can explain people{\textquoteright}s reasoning about the unseen causes of expressions. A hierarchical Bayesian model simulates which events people infer to be the cause of others{\textquoteright} expressions by comparing the emotions inferred from the expressions against the emotions people were predicted to experience in various situations. This causal model provides a close, parameter-free fit to human causal judgments, suggesting that humans interpret expressions in the context of emotion predictions generated by a causally-structured mental model of other minds.}, keywords = {Affective Cognition, Bayesian Theory of Mind, Causal Reasoning, Emotion Recognition, Emotion Understanding, intuitive theory}, url = {https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7sn3w3n2}, author = {Sean Dae Houlihan and Desmond Ong and Maddie Cusimano and Rebecca Saxe} } @article {5090, title = {Using child-friendly movie stimuli to study the development of face, place, and object regions from age 3 to 12 years}, journal = {Human Brain Mapping}, year = {2022}, month = {03/2022}, abstract = {

Scanning young children while they watch short, engaging, commercially-produced movies has emerged as a promising approach for increasing data retention and quality. Movie stimuli also evoke a richer variety of cognitive processes than traditional experiments, allowing the study of multiple aspects of brain development simultaneously. However, because these stimuli are uncontrolled, it is unclear how effectively distinct profiles of brain activity can be distinguished from the resulting data. Here we develop an approach for identifying multiple distinct subject-specific Regions of Interest (ssROIs) using fMRI data collected during movie-viewing. We focused on the test case of higher-level visual regions selective for faces, scenes, and objects. Adults (N = 13) were scanned while viewing a 5.6-min child-friendly movie, as well as a traditional localizer experiment with blocks of faces, scenes, and objects. We found that just 2.7 min of movie data could identify subject-specific face, scene, and object regions. While successful, movie-defined ssROIS still showed weaker domain selectivity than traditional ssROIs. Having validated our approach in adults, we then used the same methods on movie data collected from 3 to 12-year-old children (N = 122). Movie response timecourses in 3-year-old children{\textquoteright}s face, scene, and object regions were already significantly and specifically predicted by timecourses from the corresponding regions in adults. We also found evidence of continued developmental change, particularly in the face-selective posterior superior temporal sulcus. Taken together, our results reveal both early maturity and functional change in face, scene, and object regions, and more broadly highlight the promise of short, child-friendly movies for developmental cognitive neuroscience.

}, issn = {1065-9471}, doi = {10.1002/hbm.25815}, url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbm.25815}, author = {Kamps, Frederik S. and Richardson, Hilary and N. Apurva Ratan Murty and Nancy Kanwisher and Rebecca Saxe} } @article {4497, title = {Leveraging facial expressions and contextual information to investigate opaque representations of emotions.}, journal = {Emotion}, year = {2021}, month = {02/2021}, abstract = {

Observers attribute emotions to others relying on multiple cues, including facial expressions and information about the situation. Recent research has used Bayesian models to study how these cues are integrated. Existing studies have used a variety of tasks to probe emotion inferences, but limited attention has been devoted to the possibility that different decision processes might be involved depending on the task. If this is the case, understanding emotion representations might require understanding the decision processes through which they give rise to judgments. This article 1) shows that the different tasks that have been used in the literature yield very different results, 2) proposes an account of the decision processes involved that explain the differences, and 3) tests novel predictions of this account. The results offer new insights into how emotions are represented, and more broadly demonstrate the importance of taking decision processes into account in Bayesian models of cognition.

}, issn = {1528-3542}, doi = {10.1037/emo0000685}, url = {http://doi.apa.org/getdoi.cfm?doi=10.1037/emo0000685}, author = {Stefano Anzellottti and Sean Dae Houlihan and Samuel Liburd Jr and Rebecca Saxe} } @book {5076, title = {The Neural Basis of Mentalizing: Linking Models of Theory of Mind and Measures of Human Brain Activity}, year = {2021}, month = {05/2021}, pages = {209 - 235}, publisher = {Springer International Publishing}, organization = {Springer International Publishing}, address = {Cham}, isbn = {978-3-030-51889-9}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-51890-510.1007/978-3-030-51890-5_11}, url = {https://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-030-51890-5}, author = {Sean Dae Houlihan and Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Rebecca Saxe}, editor = {Gilead, Michael and Ochsner, Kevin N.} } @article {4980, title = {Selective responses to faces, scenes, and bodies in the ventral visual pathway of infants}, journal = {Current Biology}, volume = {32}, year = {2021}, month = {11/2021}, chapter = {1-20}, abstract = {

Three of the most robust functional landmarks in the human brain are the selective responses to faces in the fusiform face area (FFA), scenes in the parahippocampal place area (PPA), and bodies in the extrastriate body area (EBA). Are the selective responses of these regions present early in development or do they require many years to develop? Prior evidence leaves this question unresolved. We designed a new 32-channel infant magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) coil and collected high-quality functional MRI (fMRI) data from infants (2{\textendash}9\ months of age) while they viewed stimuli from four conditions{\textemdash}faces, bodies, objects, and scenes. We find that infants have face-, scene-, and body-selective responses in the location of the adult FFA, PPA, and EBA, respectively, powerfully constraining accounts of cortical development.

}, doi = {10.1016/j.cub.2021.10.064}, url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221015086}, author = {Heather L Kosakowski and Cohen, Michael A. and Takahashi, Atsushi and Keil, Boris and Nancy Kanwisher and Rebecca Saxe} } @article {4727, title = {Acute social isolation evokes midbrain craving responses similar to hunger}, journal = {Nature Neuroscience}, volume = {23}, year = {2020}, month = {11/2020}, pages = {1597 - 1605}, abstract = {

When people are forced to be isolated from each other, do they crave social interactions? To address this question, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural responses evoked by food and social cues after participants (n = 40) experienced 10 h of mandated fasting or total social isolation. After isolation, people felt lonely and craved social interaction. Midbrain regions showed selective activation to food cues after fasting and to social cues after isolation; these responses were correlated with self-reported craving. By contrast, striatal and cortical regions differentiated between craving food and craving social interaction. Across deprivation sessions, we found that deprivation narrows and focuses the brain{\textquoteright}s motivational responses to the deprived target. Our results support the intuitive idea that acute isolation causes social craving, similar to the way fasting causes hunger.

}, issn = {1097-6256}, doi = {10.1038/s41593-020-00742-z}, url = {http://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-020-00742-z}, author = {Tomova, Livia and Wang, Kimberly L. and Thompson, Todd and Matthews, Gillian A. and Takahashi, Atsushi and Tye, Kay M. and Rebecca Saxe} } @conference {4542, title = {Infants represent {\textquoteright}like-kin{\textquoteright} affiliation }, booktitle = {Budapest Conference on Cognitive Development}, year = {2020}, month = {01/2020}, address = {Budapest, Hungary}, author = {Ashley J. Thomas and Rebecca Saxe and Elizabeth S Spelke} } @article {4553, title = {Response patterns in the developing social brain are organized by social and emotion features and disrupted in children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder}, journal = {Cortex}, volume = {125}, year = {2020}, month = {Jan-04-2020}, pages = {12 - 29}, issn = {00109452}, doi = {10.1016/j.cortex.2019.11.021}, url = {https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31958654}, author = {Richardson, Hilary and Hyowon Gweon and Dodell-Feder, David and Malloy, Caitlin and Pelton, Hannah and Keil, Boris and Nancy Kanwisher and Rebecca Saxe} } @article {4502, title = {Parts-based representations of perceived face movements in the superior temporal sulcus}, journal = {Human Brain Mapping}, volume = {40}, year = {2019}, month = {02/2019}, pages = {2499 - 2510}, abstract = {

Facial motion is a primary source of social information about other humans. Prior fMRI studies have identified regions of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) that respond specifically to perceived face movements (termed fSTS), but little is known about the nature of motion representations in these regions. Here we use fMRI and multivoxel pattern analysis to characterize the representational content of the fSTS. Participants viewed a set of specific eye and mouth movements, as well as combined eye and mouth movements. Our results demonstrate that fSTS response patterns contain information about face movements, including subtle distinctions between types of eye and mouth movements. These representations generalize across the actor performing the movement, and across small differences in visual position. Critically, patterns of response to combined movements could be well predicted by linear combinations of responses to individual eye and mouth movements, pointing to a parts-based representation of complex face movements. These results indicate that the fSTS plays an intermediate role in the process of inferring social content from visually perceived face movements, containing a representation that is sufficiently abstract to generalize across low-level visual details, but still tied to the kinematics of face part movements.

}, issn = {1065-9471}, doi = {10.1002/hbm.v40.810.1002/hbm.24540}, url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/10970193/40/8}, author = {Ben Deen and Rebecca Saxe} } @article {4556, title = {Representational similarity precedes category selectivity in the developing ventral visual pathway}, journal = {NeuroImage}, volume = {197}, year = {2019}, month = {Jan-08-2019}, pages = {565 - 574}, issn = {10538119}, doi = {10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.05.010}, url = {https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31077844}, author = {Cohen, Michael A. and Dilks, Daniel D. and Kami Koldewyn and Weigelt, Sarah and Jenelle Feather and Alexander J. E. Kell and Keil, Boris and Fischl, Bruce and Z{\"o}llei, Lilla and Lawrence Wald and Rebecca Saxe and Nancy Kanwisher} } @article {3584, title = {Imaging the infant brain}, volume = {Kobe Japan}, year = {2018}, month = {07/2018}, url = {http://www.neuroscience2018.jnss.org/en/}, author = {Rebecca Saxe} } @article {2716, title = {Formalizing emotion concepts within a Bayesian model of theory of mind}, journal = {Current Option in Psychology}, volume = {17}, year = {2017}, month = {10/2017}, pages = {15-21}, chapter = {15}, abstract = {

Sensitivity to others{\textquoteright} emotions is foundational for many aspects of human life, yet computational models do not currently approach the sensitivity and specificity of human emotion knowledge. Perception of isolated physical expressions largely supplies ambiguous, low-dimensional, and noisy information about others{\textquoteright} emotional states. By contrast, observers attribute specific granular emotions to another person based on inferences of how she interprets (or {\textquotedblleft}appraises{\textquotedblright}) external events in relation to her other mental states (goals, beliefs, moral values, costs). These attributions share neural mechanisms with other reasoning about minds. Situating emotion concepts in a formal model of people{\textquoteright}s intuitive theories about other minds is necessary to effectively capture humans{\textquoteright} fine-grained emotion understanding.

}, keywords = {appraisal, bayes, emotion, inference, perception}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.04.019}, url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X17300283}, author = {Rebecca Saxe and Sean Dae Houlihan} } @article {2721, title = {Modeling emotion attributions as inference in an intuitive theory of mind.}, year = {2017}, address = {University of Wisconsin - Madison}, abstract = {

We model how people make third party emotion attributions as integration of perceptual cues and conceptual event knowledge in an intuitive causal theory of mind. Novel stimuli generated from a televised gameshow provide authentic (not staged) dynamic displays of emotion in the context of a quantifiable and repeatable game (a one-shot prisoner{\textquoteright}s dilemma). The gameshow involves public acts of cooperation, commitment, and betrayal, with stakes spanning five orders of magnitude (max ≈ $200,000), and thus supports a wide range of inferred emotions. The raw footage is separated into expression cues and contextual descriptions such that each player{\textquoteright}s emotions can be inferred from the player{\textquoteright}s reactions to the outcome (i.e. facial expressions and body postures), or from the event context (i.e. stakes, actions, and outcomes), or from both information sources together. Study participants attribute the experience of 20 nuanced emotions to the contestants based on (i) only dynamic visual emotion cues, (ii) only event descriptions, and (iii) combined dynamic visual cues and event descriptions. Principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering of emotion ratings are used to assess the dimensionality and structure of the attribution space supported by each unimodal signal as well as by the multimodal signal. The attributions are modeled using general linear regression with a priori features derived from behavioral economics and experimental psychology, including prospect theory, expected utility, and loss aversion. Finally, a Bayesian generative cue-combination model tests how effective joint conditioning on the unimodal signals is in explaining the emotion inferences participants make when given multimodal information.

}, keywords = {attribution, bayes, emotion, inference, inverse, perception}, author = {Sean Dae Houlihan and Rebecca Saxe} } @article {2568, title = {Organization of high-level visual cortex in human infants}, journal = {Nature Communications}, year = {2017}, month = {01/2017}, abstract = {

How much of the structure of the human mind and brain is already specified at birth, and how much arises from experience? In this article, we consider the test case of extrastriate visual cortex, where a highly systematic functional organization is present in virtually every normal adult, including regions preferring behaviourally significant stimulus categories, such as faces, bodies, and scenes. Novel methods were developed to scan awake infants with fMRI, while they viewed multiple categories of visual stimuli. Here we report that the visual cortex of 4{\textendash}6-month-old infants contains regions that respond preferentially to abstract categories (faces and scenes), with a spatial organization similar to adults. However, precise response profiles and patterns of activity across multiple visual categories differ between infants and adults. These results demonstrate that the large-scale organization of category preferences in visual cortex is adult-like within a few months after birth, but is subsequently refined through development.

}, doi = {10.1038/ncomms13995}, url = {http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/ncomms13995}, author = {Ben Deen and Richardson, Hilary and Dilks, Daniel D. and Takahashi, Atsushi and Keil, Boris and Lawrence Wald and Nancy Kanwisher and Rebecca Saxe} } @article {2763, title = {Rational quantitative attribution of beliefs, desires, and percepts in human mentalizing}, journal = {Nature Human Behavior}, volume = {1}, year = {2017}, month = {03/2017}, abstract = {

Social cognition depends on our capacity for {\textquoteleft}mentalizing{\textquoteright}, or explaining an agent{\textquoteright}s behaviour in terms of their mental states. The development and neural substrates of mentalizing are well-studied, but its computational basis is only beginning to be probed. Here we present a model of core mentalizing computations: inferring jointly an actor{\textquoteright}s beliefs, desires and percepts from how they move in the local spatial environment. Our Bayesian theory of mind (BToM) model is based on probabilistically inverting artificial-intelligence approaches to rational planning and state estimation, which extend classical expected-utility agent models to sequential actions in complex, partially observable domains. The model accurately captures the quantitative mental-state judgements of human participants in two experiments, each varying multiple stimulus dimensions across a large number of stimuli. Comparative model fits with both simpler {\textquoteleft}lesioned{\textquoteright} BToM models and a family of simpler non-mentalistic motion features reveal the value contributed by each component of our model.

}, keywords = {Human behaviour, Social behaviour}, doi = {doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0064}, url = {http://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0064}, author = {Chris Baker and Julian Jara-Ettinger and Rebecca Saxe and Joshua B. Tenenbaum} } @article {2619, title = {Decoding task and stimulus representations in face-responsive cortex}, journal = {Cognitive Neuropsychology}, year = {2016}, author = {Dorit Kliemann and Nir Jacoby and Stefano Anzellottti and Rebecca Saxe} } @article {989, title = {Decoding task and stimulus representation in face-responsive cortex}, year = {2015}, note = {

To be presented

}, author = {Dorit Kliemann and Nir Jacoby and Stefano Anzellottti and Rebecca Saxe} } @article {1751, title = {Functional organization of social perception and cognition in the superior temporal sulcus}, journal = {Cerebral Cortex}, volume = {25}, year = {2015}, month = {11/2015}, pages = {4596-4609}, abstract = {

The superior temporal sulcus (STS) is considered a hub for social perception and cognition, including the perception of faces and human motion, as well as understanding others{\textquoteright} actions, mental states, and language. However, the functional organization of the STS remains debated: Is this broad region composed of multiple functionally distinct modules, each specialized for a different process, or are STS subregions multifunctional, contributing to multiple processes? Is the STS spatially organized, and if so, what are the dominant features of this organization? We address these questions by measuring STS responses to a range of social and linguistic stimuli in the same set of human participants, using fMRI. We find a number of STS subregions that respond selectively to certain types of social input, organized along a posterior-to-anterior axis. We also identify regions of overlapping response to multiple contrasts, including regions responsive to both language and theory of mind, faces and voices, and faces and biological motion. Thus, the human STS contains both relatively domain-specific areas, and regions that respond to multiple types of social information.

}, doi = { 10.1093/cercor/bhv111}, url = {http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/11/4596.full}, author = {Ben Deen and Kami Koldewyn and Nancy Kanwisher and Rebecca Saxe} } @article {1749, title = {Functional organization of the human superior temporal sulcus}, number = { Poster Number: 4380 }, year = {2015}, month = {6/2015}, address = {Honolulu, HI}, abstract = {

The human superior temporal sulcus (STS) has been implicated in a broad range of social perceptual and cognitive processes, including the perception of faces, biological motion, and vocal sounds, and the understanding of language and mental states. However, little is known about the overall functional organization of these responses. Does the STS contain distinct, specialized regions for processing different types of social information? Or is cortex in the STS largely multifunctional, with each region engaged in multiple different computations (Hein, 2008)? Because prior work has largely studied these processes independently, this question remains unanswered. Here, we first identify distinct functional subregions of the STS, and then examine their response to a broad range of social stimuli.

}, url = {https://ww4.aievolution.com/hbm1501/index.cfm?do=abs.viewAbs\&abs=3635}, author = {Ben Deen and Nancy Kanwisher and Rebecca Saxe} } @article {1750, title = {Parts-based representations of perceived face movements in the superior temporal sulcus}, year = {2015}, month = {11/19/2015}, address = {Chicago, IL}, url = {https://www.sfn.org/~/media/SfN/Documents/Annual\%20Meeting/FinalProgram/NS2015/Daily\%20Books\%202015/AM15Monday.ashx}, author = {Ben Deen and Rebecca Saxe} } @article {1260, title = {Using fNIRS to Map Functional Specificity in the Infant Brain: An fROI Approach}, year = {2015}, author = {Lindsey J Powell and Ben Deen and Li Guo and Rebecca Saxe} } @article {940, title = {Exploring the functional organization of the superior temporal sulcus with a broad set of naturalistic stimuli}, year = {2014}, author = {Ben Deen and Nancy Kanwisher and Rebecca Saxe} }