Abstract：
In his 1872 monograph, Charles Darwin posited that \"… the habit of expressing our feelings by certain movements, though now rendered innate, had been in some manner gradually acquired.\"1 Nearly 150 years later, researchers are still teasing apart innate versus experience-dependent contributions to expression recognition. Indeed, studies have shown that face detection is surprisingly resilient to early visual deprivation,2,3,4,5 pointing to plasticity that extends beyond dogmatic critical periods.6,7,8 However, it remains unclear whether such resilience extends to downstream processing, such as the ability to recognize facial expressions. The extent to which innate versus experience-dependent mechanisms contribute to this ability has yet to be fully explored.9,10,11,12,13 To investigate the impact of early visual experience on facial-expression recognition, we studied children with congenital cataracts who have undergone sight-correcting treatment14,15 and tracked their longitudinal skill acquisition as they gain sight late in life. We introduce and explore two potential facilitators of late-life plasticity: the availability of newborn-like coarse visual acuity prior to treatment16 and the privileged role of motion following treatment.4,17,18 We find that early visual deprivation does not preclude partial acquisition of facial-expression recognition. While rudimentary pretreatment vision is sufficient to allow a low level of expression recognition, it does not facilitate post-treatment improvements. Additionally, only children commencing vision with high visual acuity privilege the use of dynamic cues. We conclude that skipping typical visual experience early in development and introducing high-resolution imagery late in development restricts, but does not preclude, facial-expression skill acquisition and that the representational mechanisms driving this learning differ from those that emerge during typical visual development.
摘要：
在他1872年的专著中,查尔斯·达尔文提出，“...通过某些动作表达我们感情的习惯，虽然现在呈现天生的，已经以某种方式逐渐获得。\"近150年后，研究人员仍在梳理先天和经验依赖的表达识别贡献。的确,研究表明，人脸检测对早期视觉剥夺具有惊人的弹性，2,3,4,5指向超越教条式临界周期的可塑性。6,7,8然而，目前尚不清楚这种弹性是否延伸到下游加工，例如识别面部表情的能力。先天机制与经验依赖机制对这种能力的贡献程度尚未得到充分探索。9,10,11,12,13调查早期视觉体验对面部表情识别的影响，我们研究了接受过矫正视力治疗的先天性白内障儿童14,15,并跟踪了他们在晚年获得视力时的纵向技能获得.我们介绍并探讨了晚年可塑性的两个潜在促进因素：治疗前新生儿般的粗视视力的可用性16和治疗后运动的特权作用。4,17,18我们发现早期视觉剥夺并不排除面部表情识别的部分获取。虽然基本的预处理视觉足以允许低水平的表达识别，它不促进治疗后的改善。此外,只有儿童开始视力与高视力特权使用动态线索。我们得出的结论是，在开发初期跳过典型的视觉体验并在开发后期引入高分辨率图像会限制，但并不排除，面部表情技能的获取以及驱动这种学习的表征机制与典型视觉发育过程中出现的机制不同。
