Dr Carina De Klerk from University of Essex offers a talk and results presentation.
Location
Round the Green Table in Psychology, 6th floor of the Copland building, New Cavendish Street Campus
Open to all Social Sciences staff and students.
Event
Facial mimicry, the tendency to spontaneously and unconsciously copy others’ facial expressions, plays an important role in social interactions, yet its ontogeny is still debated. In this talk Dr Carina De Klerk will present the results of two studies that test the hypothesis that sensorimotor experience is critical in the development of facial mimicry.
The first study showed a relationship between mothers’ tendency to imitate their 4-month-olds’ facial expressions during a parent-child interaction session and the infants’ tendency to mimic others as measured by electromyography (EMG). Maternal facial imitation was not related to infants’ mimicry of hand actions, and instead found preliminary evidence that infants’ tendency to look at their own hands may be related to their tendency to mimic hand actions. However, because this was a correlational study in which infants’ sensorimotor experience was not manipulated, it does not provide conclusive evidence for the idea that correlated sensorimotor experience plays a causal role in supporting mimicry.
Additionally, as this study did not measure motor cortex activation, it is unknown how the observed facial mimicry related to activation of the corresponding motor representations in the brain.
In the second preregistered study, we are systematically manipulating infants’ experience with their own facial actions by giving 4-month-olds two weeks of daily sensorimotor experience with their own facial actions via a toy mirror, while infants in the control condition play with the same toy without the mirror. Before and after this intervention, we measure infants’ facial mimicry using EMG and their sensorimotor cortex activation using electroencephalography (EEG) while they observe videos of other infants’ facial actions.
We predict that infants who receive a greater amount of correlated sensorimotor experience with their own facial actions will show greater sensorimotor cortex activation and greater facial mimicry during the observation of others’ facial actions. Data collection for this study is nearly finalised (N=98 participants tested so far), and the results will be presented in the talk. The use of complementary methods (EMG and EMG) allows us to obtain an objective measure of facial mimicry (EMG), as well as a measure of the neural correlates underlying it (EEG). Together these studies provide insight into the role of correlated sensorimotor experience in the development of facial mimicry, contributing to the ongoing debate regarding its ontogeny.
