Special seminar by Natalie Peluso

Date and time: 23 May 2024, 12pm to 1pm

Talk location: Redmond Barry Building, Room 624

Light refreshments location: Redmond Barry Building, Level 12 pantry

Talk details:

Title: Understanding social intelligence using naturalistic facial expressions.

Abstract: Changes in social intelligence are associated with both normal adult aging and neurodegenerative disease, particularly the perception and interpretation of facial expressions. However, our understanding of these changes has been constrained by the widespread use of posed prototypical facial expressions as stimuli in both research and clinical assessment. Such stimuli are criticized for their poor ecological validity and fail to capture the multiplexed variation of emotive face behaviour. Here, I present the results of a large-scale behavioural experiment using wild-type naturalistic face stimuli, designed to characterise changes in how we read and recognise facial attributes across the adult life span. I found that naturalistic expressions revealed multidimensional representations of expression perception which were not explained by prototypical emotion categories yet remained highly stable over the lifespan, even at the individual subject level. Interestingly, the stability of these behavioural responses varied between females and males, suggesting gender may elicit multidirectional differences in expression perception as people age. The next stage of this project is to compare this rich dataset to a clinical sample of individuals with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) to improve the time-course of diagnosing social cognition difficulties and to elucidate the neural pathways driving such changes.

Speaker bio:

Natalie Christie Peluso is an emerging researcher undertaking her PhD at The University of Queensland under the supervision of Associate Professor Jessica Taubert and Professor Julie Henry. Following 20 years of international acclaim as an opera singer and voice teacher, Natalie received her Bachelor of Psychological Science (1st Class Hons) from The University of Queensland in 2023, adding to her Bachelor of Music from The University of Melbourne and her postgraduate studies in opera at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Natalie now channels her performance expertise into investigating social intelligence, with a particular focus on facial expressions, mind-body interactions, and interoception.