Pupillary Responses to Faces Are Modulated by Familiarity and Rewarding Context.

ABSTRACT: Observing familiar (known, recognisable) and socially relevant (personally important) faces elicits activation in the brain's reward circuit. Although smiling faces are often used as social rewards in research, it is firstly unclear whether familiarity and social relevance modulate the processing of faces differently, and secondly whether this processing depends on the feedback context, i.e., if it is different when smiles are delivered depending on performance or in the absence of any action (passive viewing). In this preregistered study, we compared pupillary responses to smiling faces differing in subjective familiarity and social relevance. They were displayed in a passive viewing task and in an active task (a speeded visual short-term memory task). The pupils were affected only in the

SUBMITTER: Matyjek M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8235004 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature