Face Processing and Social Cognition Lab

I am enrolled as a PhD student in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. I completed my masters in Paris (universite Paris 5) and Lausanne (EPFL).
I am interested in emotions, gaze, empathy and a pathology characterized by a lack of empathy and an abnormal gaze processing: autism. I am currently working on a project in which I am trying to assess the impact of emotion on the gaze orienting effect both at the behavioural and at the brain level, using the EEG technique. The gaze orienting effect is our ability to answer faster to a target that has been gazed at than to a target that has been gazed away from. Autistic individuals are known to be poor at social interaction. Since social interaction requires the integration of perceived gaze and emotion in another individual, I believe that this research can help us understand their deficiency when it comes to social interaction.

My research interests lie in the field social cognition with an aim to investigate gaze detection and the perception of direct versus averted gaze between individuals. Specifically, I am interested in comparing how the direct versus averted gaze of others captures our attention using cueing tasks and visual search paradigms, while examining the cognitive brain mechanisms underlying this behaviour. My research includes using behavioural paradigms, eye-tracking methodology, and EEG.

Publications:

Palanica, A., & Itier, R. J. (2012). Attention capture by direct gaze is robust to context and task demands. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 36, 123-134.

Palanica, A., & Itier, R. J. (2011). Searching for a perceived gaze direction using eye tracking. Journal of Vision, 11, 1-13.

I am a Masters student in the Cognitive Neuroscience program at the University of Waterloo.  My current research interest involves understanding how we use social cues in our environment to facilitate proper social behaviours and interactions. Specifically, how we extract information from facial expressions to facilitate accurate emotion recognition, using eye tracking methodology. Additionally, I was involved in the first known study investigating the developmental trajectory of attention orienting by gaze across a wide age range of children, adolescents, and adults. The aim of my future studies is to explore the temporal characteristics of the extraction of information for accurate emotion recognition using EEG. This work is necessary to better understand the early stages of face processing which have been shown to be altered in clinical populations such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

Publications:

Neath, K., Limebeer C.L., Reilly, S. and Parker, L. A. (2010). Increased liking for a solution is not necessary for the attenuation of neophobia in rats. Behavioral Neuroscience, 124(3): 398-404.