Brain and Oculometric Markers of Emotional Facial Expression Recognition Deficits

Overview

Disorders in the recognition of emotional facial expressions are part of the social cognition disorders described in several diseases. They are notably present in a quasi-systematic way in diseases associated with socio-emotional behavior disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism. They are also found in some genetic syndromes with atypical neurodevelopment. In previous studies, the investigators adopted the FPVS-EEG approach to investigate facial emotion discrimination abilities in typical and atypical developing populations. the investigatorshave shown that, in typical adults, the neural response to facial expressions emerges as emotional intensity parametrically increases. A time-domain analysis revealed three components, with the first two increasing linearly with expressive intensity, and the third (beyond 300 ms) showing categorical sensitivity to increasing expressive intensity. The investigators have already successfully extended this approach to the investigation of patients, such as those with 22q11.2 syndrome. The brain response to facial expression was reduced by approximately 36% in these patients, revealing impaired visual coding of emotional facial signals. In this study, response amplitude was associated with positive symptom severity, indicating a potential endophenotype for psychosis risk. Here, the investigators study the implementation of high-level processes and the top-down effect it should have on the response of occipitotemporal regions to identify altered brain markers in schizophrenic patients, but also in other populations with expression recognition deficits (autistic, 22q11.2, in particular). The implementation of compensatory strategies that should result in an increased exploration of the lower part of the face at the oculometric level will also be studied.

Disorders in the recognition of emotional facial expressions are part of the social cognition disorders described in several pathologies. In particular, they are almost systematically present in pathologies associated with socio-emotional behavior disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism. They are also found in certain genetic pathologies with atypical neurodevelopment . Recently, it has been suggested to use a new approach to better understand the brain specificity of populations with face recognition difficulties: the Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation (FPVS) approach coupled with electroencephalography (FPVS-EEG) . This has been done successfully for Autism Spectrum Disorder. The investigators have also done this for 22q11.2 syndrome . This approach has proven to be particularly well suited to the study of atypical populations. However, studies to date have investigated the implicit processing of emotional facial expression. The role of top-down mechanisms related to the task remains to be studied. Moreover, in these different diseases, difficulties in facial emotion recognition are furthermore associated with abnormalities in the visual exploration of facial features. Some profiles (looking at the lower part) might reflect compensatory strategies to compensate for difficulties in perceiving the whole face or the upper part (i.e., the eye region). Other patterns (disorganized exploration) could reflect the prevalence of psychotic signs.