こころの未来講演会　Jari Hietanen先生

こころの未来講演会　Jari Hietanen先生
日時 2010年11月15日（月）16:30-18:00　
場所　京都大学稲盛財団記念館３階小会議室１
題目　How other people affect our attention, emotion, and motivation.
講演者　Jari Hietanen　University of Tampere, University of Tokyo
In my talk I will describe results from three different lines of our recent research. First, I will present studies investigating gaze-cued attention orienting. An interesting question on the field has been whether gaze-cued shifts of attention are qualitatively different from shifts of attention triggered, for example, by symbolic cues like arrows. Gaze-cued attention orienting has been suggested to be more strongly automatic and reflexive than orienting to arrows. However, our recent results question these suggestions. When the automaticity hypothesis is put into a rigorous test, gaze cuing does not seem to be any more automatic than arrow cuing. Also, there are instances, when other people’s laterally averted gaze can, in fact, trigger attention shifts away from this direction. In the second part of my talk, I will describe studies suggesting that seeing another person’s direct vs. averted gaze has differential effects on perceivers’ affective-motivational responses as measured by frontal EEG asymmetry and autonomic responses. The results show that direct gaze seem to elicit brain activation associated with motivational approach tendency, whereas averted gaze elicits activation associated with avoidance. Autonomic responses also discriminate between direct and averted gaze, being larger to direct than averted gaze. Interestingly, our results show that, in these studies, the gaze direction effects are observed only when the participants are looking at a “live” face of another person, but not when the same face is presented as a picture on a computer monitor. Finally, I will describe results from our newest line of research. This relates to visual processing of human bodies. Previous event-related potential studies have shown that the well-know ‘face sensitive’ N170 component is also sensitive to perception of human bodies. We have investigated whether the visual processing of bodies as reflected by N170 response is sensitive to the degree of clothing. Our results show that the early visual processing of male and female human bodies is enhanced if their sex-related features are visible. We propose that this enhancement of visual processing of nude over clothed bodies reflects the relevance of nude bodies to sexually motivated behavior.

2010/11/11