Abstract
Detecting regularities and extracting patterns is a vital skill to organize complex information in our environments. Statistical learning, a process where we detect regularities by attending to relationships between cues in our environment, contributes to knowledge acquisition across myriad domains. However, less is known about how emotional cues—specifically facial configurations of emotion—influence statistical learning. Here, we tested two pre-registered aims to advance knowledge about emotional signals and statistical learning: (1) we examined statistical learning in the context of emotional compared to non-emotional information, and (2) we assessed how emotional congruency (i.e., whether facial stimuli conveyed the same, or different emotions) influenced regularity extraction. We demonstrated statistical learning in the context of emotional signals. Further, we showed that statistical learning occurs more efficiently in the context of emotional faces. We also established that congruent cues benefited an online measure of statistical learning, but had varied effects when statistical learning was assessed via post-exposure recognition test. The results shed light on how affective signals influence well-studied cognitive skills and address a knowledge gap about how cue congruency impacts statistical learning, including how emotional cues might guide predictions in our social world.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Arciuli, J., von Torkildsen, J. K., Stevens, D. J., & Simpson, I. C. (2014). Statistical learning under incidental versus intentional conditions. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00747.
Aslin, R. N. (2017). Statistical learning: A powerful mechanism that operates by mere exposure. WIREs Cognitive Science, 8(1–2), e1373. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1373.
Atias, D., Todorov, A., Liraz, S., Eidinger, A., Dror, I., Maymon, Y., & Aviezer, H. (2019). Loud and unclear: Intense real-life vocalizations during affective situations are perceptually ambiguous and contextually malleable. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(10), 1842–1848. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000535.
Barrett, L. F., Adolphs, R., Marsella, S., Martinez, A. M., & Pollak, S. D. (2019). Emotional expressions reconsidered: Challenges to inferring emotion from human facial movements. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 20(1), 1–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100619832930.
Bukach, C. M., Gauthier, I., & Tarr, M. J. (2006). Beyond faces and modularity: The power of an expertise framework. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(4), 159–166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.02.004.
Chaplin, T. M., & Cole, P. M. (2005). The role of emotion regulation in the development of psychopathology. In B. L. Hankin & J. R. Z. Abela (Eds.), Development of psychopathology: A vulnerability-stress perspective (pp. 49–74). Inc: Sage Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452231655.n3.
Clément, F., & Dukes, D. (2017). Social appraisal and social referencing: Two components of affective social learning. Emotion Review, 9(3), 253–261. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073916661634.
Conley, M. I., Dellarco, D. V., Rubien-Thomas, E., Cohen, A. O., Cervera, A., Tottenham, N., & Casey, B. (2018). The racially diverse affective expression (RADIATE) face stimulus set. Psychiatry Research, 270, 1059–1067. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2018.04.066.
Curby, K. M., & Gauthier, I. (2010). To the trained eye: Perceptual expertise alters visual processing. Topics in Cognitive Science, 2(2), 189–201. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2009.01058.x.
Dolan, R. J., Morris, J. S., & de Gelder, B. (2001). Crossmodal binding of fear in voice and face. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(17), 10006–10010. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.171288598.
Dotsch, R., Hassin, R. R., & Todorov, A. (2016). Statistical learning shapes face evaluation. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(1), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-016-0001.
Dubey, R., Mehta, H., & Lombrozo, T. (2021). Curiosity is contagious: A social influence intervention to induce curiosity. Cognitive Science, 45(2), e12937. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12937.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1975). Unmasking the face: A guide to recognizing emotions from facial clues. Prentice-Hall.
Everaert, J., Koster, E. H. W., & Joormann, J. (2020). Finding patterns in emotional information: Enhanced sensitivity to statistical regularities within negative information. Emotion, 20(3), 426–435. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000563.
Fine, I., & Jacobs, R. A. (2002). Comparing perceptual learning across tasks: A review. Journal of Vision, 2(2), 5–203. https://doi.org/10.1167/2.2.5.
Frost, R., Armstrong, B. C., Siegelman, N., & Christiansen, M. H. (2015). Domain generality versus modality specificity: The paradox of statistical learning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(3), 117–125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2014.12.010.
Gergely, G., & Király, I. (2019). Natural pedagogy of social emotions. Foundations of Affective Social Learning: Conceptualizing the Social Transmission of Value, 87–114.
Glicksohn, A., & Cohen, A. (2013). The role of cross-modal associations in statistical learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20(6), 1161–1169. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-013-0458-4.
Gweon, H. (2021). Inferential social learning: Cognitive foundations of human social learning and teaching. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(10), 896–910. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.07.008.
Hanson, J. L., van den Bos, W., Roeber, B. J., Rudolph, K. D., Davidson, R. J., & Pollak, S. D. (2017). Early adversity and learning: Implications for typical and atypical behavioral development. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 58(7), 770–778. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12694.
Harms, M. B., Bowen, K. E. S., Hanson, J. L., & Pollak, S. D. (2018). Instrumental learning and cognitive flexibility processes are impaired in children exposed to early life stress. Developmental Science, 21(4), e12596. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12596.
Heron-Delaney, M., Anzures, G., Herbert, J. S., Quinn, P. C., Slater, A. M., Tanaka, J. W., Lee, K., & Pascalis, O. (2011). Perceptual training prevents the emergence of the other race effect during infancy. PLoS One, 6(5), e19858. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0019858.
Hoemann, K., Xu, F., & Barrett, L. F. (2019). Emotion words emotion concepts and emotional development in children: A constructionist hypothesis. Developmental Psychology, 55(9), 1830-1849. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000686
Krogh, L., Vlach, H., & Johnson, S. P. (2013). Statistical learning across development: Flexible yet constrained. Frontiers in Psychology, 3. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00598.
Meeren, H. K., van Heijnsbergen, C. C., & de Gelder, B. (2005). Rapid perceptual integration of facial expression and emotional body language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(45), 16518–16523. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0507650102.
Mermier, J., Quadrelli, E., Turati, C., & Bulf, H. (2022). Sequential learning of emotional faces is statistical at 12 months of age. Infancy, 27(3), 479–491. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12463.
Mitchel, A. D., & Weiss, D. J. (2014). Visual speech segmentation: Using facial cues to locate word boundaries in continuous speech. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29(7), 771–780. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2013.791703.
Moses, L. J., Baldwin, D. A., Rosicky, J. G., & Tidball, G. (2001). Evidence for referential understanding in the emotions domain at twelve and eighteen months. Child Development, 72(3), 718–735. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00311.
Mumme, D. L., Fernald, A., & Herrera, C. (1996). Infants’ responses to facial and vocal emotional signals in a social referencing paradigm. Child Development, 67(6), 3219–3237. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1996.tb01910.x.
Niedenthal, P. M., Rychlowska, M., & Wood, A. (2017). Feelings and contexts: Socioecological influences on the nonverbal expression of emotion. Current Opinion in Psychology, 17, 170–175. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.07.025.
Patzwald, C., Curley, C. A., Hauf, P., & Elsner, B. (2018). Differential effects of others’ emotional cues on 18-month-olds’ preferential reproduction of observed actions. Infant Behavior and Development, 51, 60–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2018.04.002.
Plate, R. C., Shutts, K., Cochrane, A., Green, C. S., & Pollak, S. D. (2021). Testimony bias lingers across development under uncertainty. Developmental Psychology, 57(12), 2150–2164. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001253.
Pollak, S. D., Messner, M., Kistler, D. J., & Cohn, J. F. (2009). Development of perceptual expertise in emotion recognition. Cognition, 110(2), 242–247. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.10.010.
Ruba, A. L., Pollak, S. D., & Saffran, J. R. (2022). Acquiring complex communicative systems: Statistical learning of language and emotion. Topics in Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12612.
Ruba, A. L., & Repacholi, B. M. (2020). Beyond language in infant emotion concept development. Emotion Review, 12(4), 255–258. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073920931574.
Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274(5294), 1926–1928. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.274.5294.1926.
Santolin, C., & Saffran, J. R. (2018). Constraints on statistical learning across species. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(1), 52–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.10.003.
Schapiro, A. C., Kustner, L. V., & Turk-Browne, N. B. (2012). Shaping of object representations in the human medial temporal lobe based on temporal regularities. Current Biology, 22(17), 1622–1627. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.06.056.
Schirmer, A., & Adolphs, R. (2017). Emotion perception from face, voice, and touch: Comparisons and convergence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(3), 216–228. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2017.01.001.
Sherman, B. E., Graves, K. N., & Turk-Browne, N. B. (2020). The prevalence and importance of statistical learning in human cognition and behavior. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 32, 15–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.01.015.
Siegelman, N., Bogaerts, L., Christiansen, M. H., & Frost, R. (2017). Towards a theory of individual differences in statistical learning. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 372(1711), 20160059. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0059.
Siegelman, N., & Frost, R. (2015). Statistical learning as an individual ability: Theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence. Journal of Memory and Language, 81, 105–120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.02.001.
Siegelman, N., Bogaerts, L., Kronenfeld, O., & Frost, R. (2018). Redefining “learning” in statistical learning: What does an online measure reveal about the assimilation of visual regularities? Cognitive Science, 42, 692–727. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12556.
Smith, L. B., Jayaraman, S., Clerkin, E., & Yu, C. (2018). The developing infant creates a curriculum for statistical learning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(4), 325–336. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.02.004.
Sorce, J. F., Emde, R. N., Campos, J. J., & Klinnert, M. D. (1985). Maternal emotional signaling: Its effect on the visual cliff behavior of 1-year-olds. Developmental Psychology, 21(1), 195–200. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.21.1.195.
Tanaka, J. W., Curran, T., & Sheinberg, D. L. (2005). The training and transfer of real-world perceptual expertise. Psychological Science, 16(2), 145–151. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.00795.x.
Tanaka, J. W., Heptonstall, B., & Hagen, S. (2013). Perceptual expertise and the plasticity of other-race face recognition. Visual Cognition, 21(9–10), 1183–1201. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2013.826315.
Tanaka, J. W., & Taylor, M. (1991). Object categories and expertise: Is the basic level in the eye of the beholder? Cognitive Psychology, 23(3), 457–482. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(91)90016-H.
Tottenham, N., Tanaka, J. W., Leon, A. C., McCarry, T., Nurse, M., Hare, T. A., Marcus, D. J., Westerlund, A., Casey, B. J., & Nelson, C. (2009). The NimStim set of facial expressions: Judgments from untrained research participants. Psychiatry Research, 168(3), 242–249. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2008.05.006.
Van de Cruys, S., de-Wit, L., Evers, K., Boets, B., & Wagemans, J. (2013). Weak priors versus overfitting of predictions in autism: Reply to Pellicano and Burr (TICS , 2012). I-Perception, 4(2), 95–97. https://doi.org/10.1068/i0580ic.
Van de Cruys, S., Evers, K., Van der Hallen, R., Van Eylen, L., Boets, B., de-Wit, L., & Wagemans, J. (2014). Precise minds in uncertain worlds: Predictive coding in autism. Psychological Review, 121(4), 649–675. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037665.
Walle, E. A., Reschke, P. J., & Knothe, J. M. (2017). Social referencing: Defining and delineating a basic process of emotion. Emotion Review, 9(3), 245–252. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073916669594.
Wu, Y., Muentener, P., & Schulz, L. E. (2017). One- to four-year-olds connect diverse positive emotional vocalizations to their probable causes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(45), 11896–11901. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1707715114.
Wu, Y., & Gweon, H. (2021). Preschool-aged children jointly consider others’ emotional expressions and prior knowledge to decide when to explore. Child Development, 92(3), 862–870. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13585.
Wu, Y., Schulz, L. E., Frank, M. C., & Gweon, H. (2021). Emotion as information in early social learning. Current Directions in Psychological Science. Advance Online Publication., 30, 468–475. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214211040779.
Zebrowitz, L. A. (2017). First impressions from faces. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(3), 237–242. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721416683996.
Acknowledgements
We thank Natalie Corbett for help with data collection.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Funding Information
This research was supported by institutional funding from the University of Pennsylvania to R.W. A University of Pennsylvania MindCORE Postdoctoral Fellowship funded R.C.P.
Data Availability
The experimental paradigm and de-identified data are available on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/gc3u5/).
Ethical Approval
The University of Pennsylvania Institutional Review Board approved the research.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors have not conflicts of interest to declare.
Informed Consent
All participants provided informed consent for participation.
Code Availability
The analysis script is available on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/gc3u5/).
Author Contributions
All authors contributed to idea conception, task design, and preregistered analysis. RCP programmed the experimental task, collected data, performed the statistical analysis, and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors were involved in manuscript revision.
Additional information
Handling Editor: Jonathan Gratch
Supplementary information
ESM 1
(DOCX 1479 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Plate, R.C., Schapiro, A.C. & Waller, R. Emotional Faces Facilitate Statistical Learning. Affec Sci 3, 662–672 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-022-00130-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-022-00130-9