Kami Koldewyn

Bangor University · School of Psychology

Human interactions contain potent social cues that not only meet the eye but also the ear. Although research has identified a region in the posterior superior temporal sulcus as being particularly sensitive to visually presented social interactions (SI-pSTS), its response to auditory interactions has not been tested. Here, we used fMRI to explore b...

Human visual attention is readily captured by the social information in scenes. Multiple studies have shown that social areas of interest (AOIs) such as faces and bodies attract more attention than non-social AOIs (e.g., objects or background). However, whether this attentional bias is moderated by the presence (or absence) of a social interaction...

Humans are an inherently social species, with multiple focal brain regions sensitive to various visual social cues such as faces, bodies, and biological motion. More recently, research has begun to investigate how the brain responds to more complex, naturalistic social scenes, identifying a region in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (SI-pSTS;...

Humans are an inherently social species, with multiple focal brain regions sensitive to various visual social cues such as faces, bodies, and biological motion. More recently, research has begun to investigate how the brain responds to more complex, naturalistic social scenes, identifying a region in the posterior superior temporal sulcus (SI-pSTS;...

Adult observers are sensitive to the configuration of facial features within a face, able to distinguish between relative differences in feature spacing, and detecting deviations from typical facial appearance. How does the representation of the typical configuration of facial features develop? While there is a great deal of work describing childre...

Human attention is easily captured by social information in naturalistic scenes, and this “social preference” is already present in infancy. Additionally, recent research suggests that people preferentially attend to, and more quickly detect interacting dyads compared to non-interactors. However, very little work has examined interactive mechanisms...

Human attention is easily captured by social information in naturalistic scenes, a “social bias” that is present since infancy. Additionally, recent research suggests that visual attention to interacting dyads is heightened when compared to non-interactors. However, little work has examined how interactive mechanisms influence attention in complex...

The contribution and neural basis of cognitive control is under-specified in many prominent models of socio-cognitive processing. Important outstanding questions include whether there are multiple, distinguishable systems underpinning control and whether control is ubiquitously or selectively engaged across different social behaviours and task dema...

The process of understanding the minds of other people, such as their emotions and intentions, is mimicked when individuals try to understand an artificial mind. The assumption is that anthropomorphism, attributing human-like characteristics to non-human agents and objects, is an analogue to theory-of-mind, the ability to infer mental states of oth...

Most leading models of socio-cognitive processing devote little discussion to the nature and neuroanatomical correlates of cognitive control mechanisms. Recently, it has been proposed that the regulation of social behaviours could rely on brain regions specialised in the controlled retrieval of semantic information, namely the anterior inferior fro...

Human visual attention is readily captured by the social information in scenes. Multiple studies have shown that social areas of interest (AOIs) such as faces and bodies attract more attention than non-social AOIs (e.g. objects or background). However, whether this attentional bias is moderated by the presence (or absence) of a social interaction r...

A variety of subtle social cues, including gaze behaviour, are used to form impressions of others. For example, if another’s eye-gaze reliably helps or hinders us while we complete a task, we incidentally form a positive or negative impression about them. In real life, people are rarely so consistent in their behaviour, and they are often encounter...

A core question for the cognitive sciences concerns how we flexibly interact with others and coordinate behaviour to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. By modelling the cognitive processes underpinning neurotypical social interactions we may uncover clues as to the causes of social behavioural impairments that arise in the context of brain injur...

Head motion remains a challenging confound in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of both children and adults. Most pediatric neuroimaging labs have developed experience-based, child-friendly standards concerning e.g. the maximum length of a session or the time between mock scanner training and actual scanning. However, it is uncle...

Recent evidence demonstrates that a region of the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) is selective to visually observed social interactions in adults. In contrast, little is known about neural responses to social interactions in children. Here, we used fMRI to ask whether the pSTS is ‘tuned’ to social interactions in children at all, and if s...

Head motion remains a challenging confound in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of both children and adults. Most pediatric neuroimaging labs have developed experience-based, child-friendly standards concerning e.g. the maximum length of a session or the date of mock scanner training. However, it is unclear which factors of child...

Recent evidence demonstrates that a region of the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) is selective to visually observed social interactions in adults. In contrast, we know comparatively little about neural responses to social interactions in children. Here, we used fMRI to ask whether the pSTS would be ‘tuned’ to social interactions in childr...

Many studies have investigated the development of face-, scene-, and body-selective regions in the ventral visual pathway. This work has primarily focused on comparing the size and univariate selectivity of these neural regions in children versus adults. In contrast, very few studies have investigated the developmental trajectory of more distribute...

Recent behavioural evidence shows that visual displays of two individuals interacting are not simply encoded as separate individuals, but as an interactive unit that is 'more than the sum of its parts'. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) evidence shows the importance of the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in processing hu...

Recent behavioural evidence shows that visual displays of two individuals interacting are not simply encoded as separate individuals, but as an interactive unit that is ‘more than the sum of its parts’. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) evidence shows the importance of the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) in processing hu...

Multisensory integration (MSI) is crucial for human communication and social interaction and has been investigated in healthy populations and neurodevelopmental disorders. However, the use of stimuli with high ecological validity is sparse, especially in event-related potential (ERP) studies. The present study examined the ERP correlates of MSI in...

Imitation and perspective taking are core features of non-verbal social interactions. We imitate one another to signal a desire to affiliate and consider others' points of view to better understand their perspective. Prior research suggests that a relationship exists between prosocial behaviour and imitation. For example, priming prosocial behaviou...

Adult observers are sensitive to the configuration of facial features within a face, able to distinguish between relative differences in feature spacing, and detecting deviations from typical facial appearance. How does the representation of the typical configuration of facial features develop? While there is a great deal of work describing childre...

A set of left frontal, temporal, and parietal brain regions respond robustly during language comprehension and production (e.g., Fedorenko et al. 2010; Menenti et al. 2011). These regions have been further shown to be selective for language relative to other cognitive processes, including arithmetic, aspects of executive function, and music percept...

Imitation and perspective taking are core features of non-verbal social interactions. We imitate one another to signal a desire to affiliate and consider others' points of view to better understand their perspective. Prior research suggests that a relationship exists between prosocial behaviour and imitation. For example, priming prosocial behaviou...

Several recent studies have demonstrated reduced visual aftereffects, particularly to social stimuli, in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This putative impairment of the adaptive mechanism in ASD has been put forward as a possible explanation for some of the core social problems experienced by children with ASD (e.g., facial emotion or identity reco...

Success in the social world requires the ability to perceive not just individuals and their actions, but pairs of people and the interactions between them. Despite the complexity of social interactions, humans are adept at interpreting those interactions they observe. Although the brain basis of this remarkable ability has remained relatively unexp...

Significance Humans spend a large percentage of their time perceiving the appearance, actions, and intentions of others, and extensive previous research has identified multiple brain regions engaged in these functions. However, social life depends on the ability to understand not just individuals, but also groups and their interactions. Here we sho...

Neuroscientific investigations interested in questions of person perception and impression formation have traditionally asked their participants to observe and evaluate isolated individuals. In recent years, however, there has been a surge of studies presenting third-party encounters between two (or more) individuals as stimuli. Owing to this subtl...

New technological devices, particularly those with touch screens, have become virtually omnipresent over the last decade. Practically from birth, children are now surrounded by smart phones and tablets. Despite being our constant companions, little is known about whether these tools can be used not only for entertainment, but also to collect reliab...

The superior temporal sulcus (STS) is considered a hub for social perception and cognition, including the perception of faces and human motion, as well as understanding others' actions, mental states, and language. However, the functional organization of the STS remains debated: Is this broad region composed of multiple functionally distinct module...

A large corpus of research suggests that there are changes in the manner and degree to which the amygdala supports cognitive and emotional function across development. One possible basis for these developmental differences could be the maturation of amygdalar connections with the rest of the brain. Recent functional connectivity studies support thi...

A fundamental and largely unanswered question in neuroscience is whether extrinsic connectivity and function are closely related at a fine spatial grain across the human brain. Using a novel approach, we found that the anatomical connectivity of individual gray-matter voxels (determined via diffusion-weighted imaging) alone can predict functional m...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been reported to perform differently than neurotypical individuals on a variety of visual tasks, including visual search (e.g., Joseph, Keehn, Connolly, Wolfe, & Horowitz, 2009). Accounts of perceptual processing in ASD differ, with influential theories arguing either that these effects are attri...

Visual attention is often hypothesized to play a causal role in the development of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Because attention shapes perception, learning, and social interaction, early deficits in attention could substantially affect the development of other perceptual and cognitive abilities. Here we test two key attentional phenomena thoug...

Significance One of the most accepted brain “signatures” of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a reduction in the integrity of long-range white-matter fiber tracts. Here, we assessed known white matter tracts in children with ASD by using diffusion-weighted imaging. In contrast to most prior studies, we carefully matched for head motion between grou...

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder resulting from a CGG repeat expansion in the untranslated portion of the fragile X mental retardation 1 (FMR1) gene that causes absence of the FMR1 protein, fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP). FMRP is an RNA-binding protein that regulates the protein production of a number of other...

One critical component of understanding another's mind is the perception of "life" in a face. However, little is known about the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying this perception of animacy. Here, using a visual adaptation paradigm, we ask whether face animacy is (1) a basic dimension of face perception and (2) supported by a common neural...

Diffusion-weighted MRI (DW-MRI) has become a popular imaging modality for probing the microstructural properties of white matter and comparing them between populations in vivo. However, the contrast in DW-MRI arises from the microscopic random motion of water molecules in brain tissues, which makes it particularly sensitive to macroscopic head moti...

How does the remarkable human ability for face recognition arise over development? Competing theories have proposed either late maturity (beyond 10 years) or early maturity (before 5 years), but have not distinguished between perceptual and memory aspects of face recognition. Here, we demonstrate a perception-memory dissociation. We compare rate of...

ALTHOUGH MANY STUDIES HAVE REPORTED FACE IDENTITY RECOGNITION DEFICITS IN AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS (ASD), TWO FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION REMAINS: 1) Is this deficit "process specific" for face memory in particular, or does it extend to perceptual discrimination of faces as well? And 2) Is the deficit "domain specific" for faces, or is it found more gene...

People with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) reportedly show deficits in biological motion perception, face memory, and visual attention. Do differences in the functional architecture of visual cortex underlie these putative behavioral differences in visual processing? Evidence to date is mixed. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fM...

Observers are good at determining whether a face is real or not, and animacy is perceived categorically in human faces (Looser & Wheatley, 2010). Presently, we used high-level adaptation to determine if face animacy is represented in a category-specific fashion, or if the perception of animacy across face categories is supported by a common neural...

Visual attention is widely thought to be affected in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Because attention determines what we experience, process deeply, and remember, early impairments of attention could have substantial consequences for the development of other perceptual and cognitive abilities. Here we use a naturalistic free viewing paradigm to te...

It is widely suggested that ASD is characterized by atypical local/global processing, but the published findings are contradictory. In an effort to resolve this question, we tested a large group of children on both a free-choice task and an instructed task using hierarchical local-global stimuli. We find that although children with autism showed a...

Visual attention is often hypothesized to play a causal role in the development of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Because attention shapes perception, learning, and social interaction, early deficits in attention could substantially affect the development of other perceptual and cognitive abilities. Here we test two key attentional phenomena thoug...

Mutations of the fragile X mental retardation 1 (FMR1) gene are the genetic cause of fragile X syndrome (FXS). The presence of significant socioemotional problems has been well documented in FXS although the brain basis of those deficits remains unspecified. Here, we investigated amygdala dysfunction and its relation to socioemotional deficits and...

Previous functional MRI (fMRI) studies have shown that fragile X mental retardation 1 (FMR1) fragile X premutation allele carriers (FXPCs) exhibit decreased hippocampal activation during a recall task and lower inferior frontal activation during a working memory task compared to matched controls. The molecular characteristics of FXPCs includes 55-2...

Difficulties in visual attention are often implicated in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) but it remains unclear which aspects of attention are affected. Here, we used a multiple object tracking (MOT) task to quantitatively characterize dynamic attentional function in children with ASD aged 5-12. While the ASD group performed significantly worse ove...

A fundamental assumption in neuroscience is that brain structure determines function. Accordingly, functionally distinct regions of cortex should be structurally distinct in their connections to other areas. We tested this hypothesis in relation to face selectivity in the fusiform gyrus. By using only structural connectivity, as measured through di...

Face recognition--the ability to recognize a person from their facial appearance--is essential for normal social interaction. Face recognition deficits have been implicated in the most common disorder of social interaction: autism. Here we ask: is face identity recognition in fact impaired in people with autism? Reviewing behavioral studies we find...

The ability to perceive and understand social interactions between others is a fundamentally important cognitive skill, yet almost no research has investigated its brain basis. Here, we hypothesized that the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) – an area implicated in many other aspects of social perception – plays a key role in perception of...

Recent evidence suggests those with autism may be generally impaired in visual motion perception. To examine this, we investigated both coherent and biological motion processing in adolescents with autism employing both psychophysical and fMRI methods. Those with autism performed as well as matched controls during coherent motion perception but had...

Premutation fragile X carriers have a CGG repeat expansion (55 to 200 repeats) in the promoter region of the fragile X mental retardation 1 (FMR1) gene. Amygdala dysfunction has been observed in premutation symptomatology, and recent research has suggested the amygdala as an area susceptible to the molecular effects of the premutation. The current...

The fragile X premutation provides a unique opportunity for the study of genetic and brain mechanisms of behavior and cognition in the context of neurodevelopment and neurodegeneration. Although the neurodegenerative phenotype, fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome, is well described, evidence of a causal link between the premutation and psyc...

Faces and bodies are arguably the visual stimuli most relevant for human social interactions. Only recently, however, has research begun to reveal the interaction between face and body perception. Here we report on a recent study by Ghuman and colleagues and other behavioral and neuroimaging investigations that, taken together, provide compelling e...

Quick, accurate biological motion perception is fundamental to our understanding of the visual social world. Recent evidence has suggested that people with autism may show a selective deficit in visual motion processing. If biological motion perception is impacted in this group, it could significantly contribute to their deficits in social cognitio...

Several groups have recently reported that people with autism may suffer from a deficit in visual motion processing and proposed that these deficits may be related to a general dorsal stream dysfunction. In order to test the dorsal stream deficit hypothesis, we investigated coherent and biological motion perception as well as coherent form percepti...

Fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome (FXTAS) is a neurodegenerative disorder occurring in male and occasional female carriers of a premutation expansion (55-200 CGG repeats) of the fragile X mental retardation 1 gene (FMR1). This study assessed the relationship between hippocampal volume and psychological symptoms in carriers, both with and...

Recent studies reveal that young carriers of the fragile X premutation are at increased risk for psychiatric conditions, memory problems and executive deficits. Post mortem and structural MRI studies suggest the hippocampus is preferentially affected by the premutation. The current study utilized magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to explore the rela...