New article by Kerstin Unger, Meanie, Kacin and Rasha Abdel Rahman: Evolving object concepts in the adult brain: An electrophysiological investigation

This study investigated how the gradual acquisition of object meaning influences different phases of object recognition. Using an interleaved learning and testing procedure, participants were repeatedly exposed to unfamiliar, rare objects while learning about their meaning and function. Across multiple test sessions, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded to examine changes in early perceptual processing (P1) and later integrative phases of object recognition (N400, late positive complex/LPC) for initially unfamiliar versus well-known objects. Initially, behavioral and ERP differences between rare and familiar objects were pronounced but gradually diminished with learning. For tasks in which object meaning was irrelevant (familiarity classification and naming), increased object knowledge was reflected in a posterior negativity in the N400 window. When object meaning was directly task-relevant (semantic classification), detailed knowledge acquisition was tracked by a later centroparietal component in the LPC window (late relatedness effect). A follow-up test 6 months later showed that these effects were not only remarkably stable but continued to evolve beyond the training period. In contrast, early perceptual processes (P1) showed limited sensitivity to the accumulation of object-specific semantic knowledge. Overall, the findings demonstrate that repeated visual exposure and incremental learning facilitate the deep integration of novel objects into existing semantic networks.

New article by Martin Maier, Alexander Leonhardt, Florian Blume, Pia Bideau, Olaf Hellwich, and Rasha Abdel Rahman:
Neural Dynamics of Mental State Attribution to Social Robot Faces

Our latest study explores how people attribute mental states to social robots based on affective information about their behavior. We found that when participants learned about a robot’s positive, negative, or neutral actions, they quickly formed impressions of its trustworthiness, facial expressions, and intentionality (aka mindedness). EEG recordings revealed that this information influenced both early perceptual and later evaluative stages of brain activity, similar to human face perception—except in fast emotional responses, where robots were processed differently. These findings suggest that while people instinctively see emotional expressions and intentions in robots, they do not elicit the same emotional engagement as humans. This research sheds light on some basic cognitive and neural mechanisms of human-robot interaction, with implications for the ethical and social integration of artificial agents in our daily lives.

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How do we want to live in times of social media consuming us, and “being most
successful when it trigges the seven deadly sins” (quote by Reid Hoffman, co-
founder of LinkedIn)? We were invited to participate in the performative tour “Digital
Sins: Hochmut & Narzissmus” taking place in the Museum for Communications
Berlin. As part of the excursions to the light and dark spheres of social media, we
brought scientific insights that empower social media users to take back their
autonomy and creativity. Our partisans on a hero’s journey, Dr. Julia Baum and
Zsuzsa Komaromy, shared a neurocognitive perspective on how deepfakes, bad
news, misinformation, and conspiriacy theories cloud our mind, brains, and
judgments. With the gained knowledge and clarity, and above all with music and
humour, we found a way out of the attention economy. We were honoured to be part
of this fun and enlightening journey with Sabrina Rossetto and Berhard Glocksin
from Neuköllner Oper, Dr. Catharina Katzer, Prof. Simon Gegelich, violinist Luiza
Labouriau, Lisa Mader as Sigmund Freud and Kamil Ahmad as leader of the partisan
group.

For more information and the upcoming second edition of Digital Sins: Wut &
Trägheit, visit the mfk-berlin or the neuköllner oper websites.
Links: https://www.mfk-berlin.de/audiowalk-digital-sins/
https://www.neukoellneroper.de/digital-sins-neue-exkursionen-ins-fegefeuer-der-
social-media/

New article by Hannah Kaube and Rasha Abdel Rahman:
Art perception is affected by negative knowledge about famous and unknown artists

Do we separate art from the artist? To add an empirical perspective to this age-old debate, we examined the influence of negative biographical knowledge about artists on the perception of their artworks. We also investigated whether an artist’s fame protects their paintings from such influence. Participants rated a series of paintings on the dimensions of liking, arousal, and quality, before and after learning either social-negative or neutral information about the respective artists. The artists were either famous or unknown. After learning the information, brain activity was recorded using an electroencephalogram (EEG).
Paintings associated with artists characterised by negative biographical information were liked less, evoked greater feelings of arousal, and were judged lower in terms of quality than paintings by artists associated with neutral information. We did not find a significant modulation of artist renown, indicating that works by both unknown and famous artists were vulnerable to the knowledge effect. Paintings attributed to ‘immoral’ artists also elicited enhanced early brain activity related to visual perception (P1) and early emotional arousal (early posterior negativity; EPN). Together, the findings suggest that negative knowledge about famous artists can shape not only explicit aesthetic evaluations, but may also penetrate the perception of the artwork itself. The insights garnered by the study underscore the importance of including empirical perspectives when considering or discussing questions typically approached in theoretical terms.

Paper: https://rdcu.be/dD1BL

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-58697-1

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New article by Martin Maier and Rasha Abdel Rahman:
Transient and Long-Term Linguistic Influences on Visual Perception: Shifting Brain Dynamics With Memory Consolidation

This paper investigates categorical perception, the phenomenon that we can distinguish faster between different stimuli when they also have different names. We tested how this is influenced by memory consolidation, the process by which our brain solidifies new information during sleep. In two experiments, participants learned to categorize unfamiliar objects by learning their names. In one experiment, we tested how fast they could tell apart the objects immediately after category learning. In the other experiment, we introduced a two-day break between the learning and the test session, leaving enough time for memory consolidation. We found that linguistic categories influenced visual perception in both experiments, but with very different underlying neural dynamics. 

Specifically, the pattern observed in several prior EEG studies, characterized by a mismatch response during early and high-level visual perception (P1 and N170 components), as well as selective attention (N2 component), only emerged with memory consolidation. Without consolidation, only an N170 effect was observed, which was, interestingly, in the opposite direction to the “canonical” pattern. We argue that this is because memory consolidation alters how objects and their associated names are encoded in the brain, resulting in more distributed “visuo-linguistic” representations. This way, language can enhance the efficiency of object discrimination both in the short and long-term.

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Job Announcement (PhD position) at the Abdel Rahman Lab for Neurocognitive Psychology at the Department of Psychology, HU Berlin:

We are looking for a research fellow (m/f/d) with expected 3/4-part-time employment (third-party funding limited for 3 years) for our new project “The neurocognition of social-emotional (mis)information”. Further information is attached and can be found on our website: https://abdelrahmanlab.com/research/

Full job description

We are looking forward to your application!

Julia Baum and Rasha Abdel Rahman

New article by Julia Baum, Romy Frömer, and Rasha Abdel Rahman:
Emotional content reduces the cognitive effort invested in processing the credibility of social (mis)information

Emotionality likely is a key factor affecting our susceptibility to misinformation. However, the mechanisms underlying this observation are not well understood. Specifically, when people derive social information from person-related news, they rely predominantly on the emotional contents, apparently unperturbed by the credibility of the source. To help explain this bias, we here contrast two hypotheses of information processing reflected in changes in pupil size during news-based judgments: Emotion and cognitive effort. Thirty participants were first exposed to websites of well-known trusted or distrusted news media sources exhibiting headlines about unfamiliar persons, followed by social judgments. As expected, emotional relative to neutral headline contents lead to faster and more strongly valenced judgments. In line with the cognitive effort hypothesis, credibility modulated pupil size with larger pupils for headlines from distrusted sources, however only in response to neutral headline contents. Source credibility did not modulate pupil size in response to emotional headline contents. Instead, pupil size was smaller for emotional compared to neutral headlines for both trusted and distrusted sources. This pattern of findings suggests that emotional contents yield fluent social judgments that are made with relatively little mental effort–even if based on untrustworthy news. Cognitive resources to evaluate the credibility of news may primarily be allocated when emotional contents providing (false) fluency are not available. This insight into the biases underlying the processing of potential misinformation may be used as a protection against biased opinions and judgments.

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New article by Anna Eiserbeck, Alexander Enge, Milena Rabovsky & Rasha Abdel Rahman:
Distrust before first sight? Examining knowledge- and appearance-based effects of trustworthiness on the visual consciousness of faces

The present EEG study with 32 healthy participants investigated whether affective knowledge about a person influences the visual awareness of their face, additionally considering the impact of facial appearance. Faces differing in perceived trustworthiness based on appearance were associated with negative or neutral social information and shown as target stimuli in an atten tional blink task. As expected, participants showed enhanced awareness of faces associated with negative compared to neutral social information. On the neurophysiological level, this effect was connected to differences in the time range of the early posterior negativity (EPN)—a component associated with enhanced attention and facilitated processing of emotional stimuli. The findings indicate that the social-affective relevance of a face based on emotional knowledge is accessed during a phase of attentional enhancement for conscious perception and can affect prioritization for awareness. In contrast, no clear evidence for influences of facial trustworthiness during the attentional blink was found.

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New article by Anna Eiserbeck, Martin Maier, Julia Baum & Rasha Abdel Rahman:
Deepfake smiles matter less—the psychological and neural impact of presumed AI-generated faces

High-quality AI-generated portraits (“deepfakes”) are becoming increasingly prevalent. Understanding the responses they evoke in perceivers is crucial in assessing their societal implications. Here we investigate the impact of the belief that depicted persons are real or deepfakes on psychological and neural measures of human face perception. Using EEG, we tracked participants’ (N = 30) brain responses to real faces showing positive, neutral, and negative expressions, after being informed that they are either real or fake. Smiling faces marked as fake appeared less positive, as reflected in expression ratings, and induced slower evaluations. Whereas presumed real smiles elicited canonical emotion effects with differences relative to neutral faces in the P1 and N170 components (markers of early visual perception) and in the EPN component (indicative of reflexive emotional processing), presumed deepfake smiles showed none of these effects. Additionally, only smiles presumed as fake showed enhanced LPP activity compared to neutral faces, suggesting more effortful evaluation. Negative expressions induced typical emotion effects, whether considered real or fake. Our findings demonstrate a dampening effect on perceptual, emotional, and evaluative processing of presumed deepfake smiles, but not angry expressions, adding new specificity to the debate on the societal impact of AI-generated content.

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