Tamami Nakano

Eye tracking has been used to investigate gaze behaviours in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, traditional analysis has yet to find behavioural characteristics shared by both children and adults with ASD. To distinguish core ASD gaze behaviours from those that change with development, we examined temporo-spatial gaze patterns in children and adults with and without ASD while they viewed video clips. We summarized the gaze patterns of 104 participants using multidimensiona

It remains unknown why we generate spontaneous eyeblinks every few seconds, more often than necessary for ocular lubrication. Because eyeblinks tend to occur at implicit breakpoints while viewing videos, we hypothesized that eyeblinks are actively involved in the release of attention. We show that while viewing videos, cortical activity momentarily decreases in the dorsal attention network after blink onset but increases in the default-mode network implicated in internal processing. In contrast,

Blinks are generally suppressed during a task that requires visual attention and tend to occur immediately before or after the task when the timing of its onset and offset are explicitly given. During the viewing of video stories, blinks are expected to occur at explicit breaks such as scene changes. However, given that the scene length is unpredictable, there should also be appropriate timing for blinking within a scene to prevent temporal loss of critical visual information. Here, we show that

Humans spontaneously generate eyeblinks every few seconds. However, because this blink rate is several times more common than is required for ocular lubrication, the function of most spontaneous eyeblinks remains unknown. Because spontaneous eyeblinks tend to occur at implicit breakpoints in video stories, I hypothesized that spontaneous eyeblinks play an active role in attentional disengagement from external stimuli. Consistent with this, we previously found that spontaneous eyeblinks involve t

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are superior in processing local features. Frith and Happe conceptualize this cognitive bias as 'weak central coherence', implying that a local enhancement derives from a weakness in integrating local elements into a coherent whole. The suggested deficit has been challenged, however, because individuals with ASD were not found to be inferior to normal controls in holistic perception. In these opposing studies, however, subjects were encouraged to

Sleeping 3-month-old infants showed anticipatory cortical activation in the temporoparietal and frontal regions only in response to the cue predicting the event, suggesting that infants can implicitly form associations between temporally separated events and generate the anticipatory activation before the predictable event. Furthermore, the different time evolution of activation in the temporoparietal and frontal regions suggests that these regions may be involved in different aspects of learnin

The self-face advantage has been demonstrated not only at the supraliminal level, but also at the subliminal level. However, it remains unclear whether subliminal self-face processing involves the same neural networks as those for supraliminal self-face processing. Here, we show that the ventral tegmental area, a center of the dopamine reward pathway, exhibited greater activation to subliminal presentations of the self-face than those of the others' faces, whereas subliminal presentations of the

The temporal pattern of spontaneous blinks changes greatly depending on an individual's internal cognitive state. For instance, when several individuals watch the same video, blinks can be synchronized at attentional breakpoints. The present study examined the degree of this blink synchronization, as reflecting an interest level, while viewing various video clips. In the first experiment, participants interested in soccer, shogi (Japanese chess), or a specific musical group watched a video clip

Spontaneous eyeblink rates vary greatly between people, from several to a few dozen blinks per minute. Nevertheless, it remains unknown which brain region controls generation of spontaneous eyeblinks. To investigate this issue, the present study examined brain anatomy, which reflects inter-individual variability in eyeblink rate using structural magnetic resonance images with voxel-based morphometry (VBM) in 57 participants. The gray matter volume of the right angular gyrus (rAG) was positively

We usually observe ourselves from two perspectives. One is the first-person perspective, which we perceive directly with our own eyes, and the other is the third-person perspective, which we observe ourselves in a mirror or a picture. However, whether the self-recognition associated with these two perspectives has a common or separate neural basis remains unclear. To address this, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain activity while participants viewed pretaped video cli

Abstract The appraisal of trustworthiness from facial appearance of a stranger is critical for successful social interaction. Although self-resemblance is considered a significant factor affecting the perception of trustworthiness, research is yet to be conducted on whether this theory is applicable to natural unfamiliar faces in real life. We examined this aspect by using a state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network for face recognition to measure the facial similarity of a large sample