Development of facial expression recognition following extended blindness: The importance of motion

Head turning is an effective cue for gaze following

“…In addition, the Prakash group revealed remarkable improvement one month after surgery, while the Silver Linings group maintained their improvement across testing sessions at 6-month intervals. Our results therefore extend previous work on the importance of motion cues for individuals with late sight onset (Ostrovsky et al, 2009;Gilad-Gutnick et al, 2019), confirming that head turning facilitates their referential communication.…”

“…Studies on face processing have shown that dynamic and static cues may have different developmental trajectories and play differential roles in bootstrapping face processing mechanisms (Mondloch et al, 2003;Blais et al, 2017). More recent work from Project Prakash has also shown that motion cues facilitate facial expression recognition in children with delayed sight onset (Gilad-Gutnick et al, 2019). In the present study, we investigated the degree to which motion cues facilitate Prakash children's use of face orientation in referential communication.…”

Project Prakash: Merging Basic Science and Societal Service in Vision Research

“…In other words, there may be clear downsides to beginning one's visual journey with higher than normal visual acuity. Consistent with this idea is data from children who experienced extremely brief periods of visual deprivation struggling with global, but not local, face recognition tasks even years after treatment (Maurer et al, 2002; Maurer & Mondloch, 2011), as well as more recent findings that early visual deprivation leads to persistent impairments in face—but not object—identification (Gilad-Gutnick et al, 2023), supposedly because objects can be individuated using local information, whereas face individuation relies on intact holistic processing. In addition to explaining the differential impairments in high-level processing that children with late sight onset exhibit, a domain-general account that explains persistent impairments in terms of acuity trajectory rather than putative critical periods also provide a foundation for possible interventions to address the observed impairments (e.g., training children with low resolution images early in the developmental trajectory may force their visual system to develop larger windows of spatial integration).…”

“…The Prakash children, who had early visual deprivation, showed a transfer effect from appreciating the referential intent of head motion during intervention trials to interpreting static face orientation in post-intervention trials (Rubio-Fernandez et al, 2022). Motion cues also strongly facilitate basic expression recognition in children with early visual deprivation, but this facilitation only emerges months to years following sight onset, pointing to an experience-expectant process (Gilad-Gutnick et al, 2019). In contrast, recent studies have shown that the perception of biological motion, such as human movements from point-light displays, seems to be largely intact in children treated for early visual deprivation (Ben-Ami et al, 2022; Bottari et al, 2015; Rajendran et al, 2020), suggesting that the neural systems for biological motion processing may not critically depend on visual experience.…”

Multimodal communication in newly sighted children: An investigation of the relation between visual experience and pragmatic development

“…Newly sighted individuals have offered researchers a unique opportunity to study the development of visual systems. Recent work from Project Prakash has shown that motion cues facilitate facial expression recognition in children with delayed sight onset (Gilad-Gutnick et al, 2019). Prakash children have also been shown to localize faces in complex scenes after surgery (Bouvrie & Sinha, 2007), and with increased visual experience, they have also demonstrated the capacity to distinguish faces from non-faces (Gandhi et al, 2017).…”