Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) suffer from motor and non-motor symptoms; 40% would develop dementia (PD-D). Impaired face and emotion processing in PD has been reported; however, the deficits of face processing in pD-D remain unclear. We investigated three essential aspects of face processing capacity in pD-D, and the associations between cognitive, neuropsychiatric assessments and task performances. Twenty-four PD-D patients (mean age: 74.0 ± 5.55) and eighteen age-matched healthy controls (HC) (mean age: 71.0 ± 6.20) received three computerized tasks, morphing-face discrimination, dynamic facial emotion recognition, and expression imitation. compared to Hc, pD-D patients had lower sensitivity (d') and greater neural internal noises in discriminating faces; responded slower and had difficulties with negative emotions; imitated some expressions but with lower strength. Correlation analyses revealed that patients with advancing age, slow mentation, and poor cognition (but not motor symptoms) showed stronger deterioration in face perception. importantly, these correlations were absent in the age-matched HC. The present study is among the first few examined face processing in patients with PD-D, and found consistent deficits correlated with advancing age and slow mentation. We propose that face discrimination task could be included as a potential test for the early detection of dementia in pD.Parkinson's disease (PD) affects 2-3% of the population worldwide over the age of 65 1 ; about 40% of PD would develop dementia (PD-D) 2 . Motor dysfunctions are core clinical features in PD 1 ; however, the contributions of non-motor symptoms to a reduced quality of life are also widely recognized 3 . Patients suffer from an array of non-motor symptoms including autonomic, digestive, cognitive, and affective dysfunctions, as well as disturbances in visual perception 4,5 . Among the visual disturbances, impairments in high-level perception such as facial identity and emotion processing drastically affect the patients' social interactions with others 6,7 .Successful recognition of facial identity and emotional expressions is fundamental to social life, the hallmark of human perceptual skills develop soon after birth 8,9 . Early studies reveal impaired face recognition in PD 10,11 , with performance correlated with gray matter density in the fusiform face areas (FFA)-the region involved in the visual analysis of face structure in the healthy brain 12,13 . Recent studies investigating face recognition in PD revealed memory deficits for both familiar and unfamiliar faces [14][15][16] , reported that impairment in configural processing (also processed in the FFA) predicted unfamiliar face recognition deficits in PD patients. While most studies focused on recognition memory in PD patients, very few inspected their perceptual discriminability under the framework of the signal detection theory 18 ; it is unclear whether the patient's impairments in

Background Whether individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have impairments with biological motion perception has been debated. The present study examined the ability to identify point‐light‐displayed (PLD) human actions in neurotypical (NT) adults and adults with ASD. Method Twenty‐seven adults with ASD (mean age = 28.36) and 30 NT adults (mean age = 22.45) were tested. Both groups viewed 10 different biological motion actions contacting an object/tool and 10 without making contact. Each action was presented twice, and participant's naming responses and reaction times were recorded. Results The ASD group had a significantly lower total number of correct items (M = 29.30 ± 5.08 out of 40) and longer response time (M = 4550 ± 1442 ms) than NT group (M = 32.77 ± 2.78; M = 3556 ± 1148 ms). Both groups were better at naming the actions without objects (ASD group: 17.33 ± 2.30, NT group: 18.67 ± 1.30) than those with objects (ASD group: 11.96 ± 3.57, NT group: 14.10 ± 1.97). Correlation analyses showed that individuals with higher Autism‐spectrum Quotient scale scores tended to make more errors and responded more slowly. Conclusion Adults with ASD were able to identify human point‐light display biological motion actions much better than chance; however, they were less proficient compared with NT adults in terms of accuracy and speed, regardless of action type.

People go beyond the inferences afforded by a person’s observable features to make guesses about personality traits or even social memberships such as political affiliations. The present study extended Hu et al. (2016) to further investigate the influence of provincial appearance on differentiating KMT (Kuomintang) and DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) candidates by headshot photos with three experiments. In Experiment 1 (Membership categorization task), participants categorized the photos from the pilot study (where the difference between the perceived age of KMT and DPP candidates was reduced) and divided into four blocks by their perceived age. We found that participants were able to distinguish KMT from DPP candidates significantly better than chance, even when the perceived age difference between the two parties was minimized. In Experiment 2 (Trait rating task), we asked young and middle-aged adults to rate six traits on candidate’s photos. We found that “provincial appearance” is the core trait differentiating the two parties for both young and older participants, while “facial maturity” is another trait for older participants only. In Experiment 3 (Double categorization task), we asked participants to categorize the photos from the Exp. 1 on their membership (KMT or DPP) and on provincial appearance (mainlander or native Taiwanese) in two separate sessions. Results showed that young adults were likely to use the “provincial appearance” as the main characteristic cue to categorize candidates’ political membership. In sum, our study showed that Taiwanese adults could categorize the two parties by their headshot photos when age cue was eliminated. Moreover, provincial appearance was the most critical trait for differentiating between KMT and DPP candidates, which may reflect a piece of significant history during the development of the two parties.