Mirror-touch synaesthesia: the role of shared ... - UCL Discovery

109
Same-Different Expression and Identity Matching Task
Chapter 5
A 2 (Group) x 2 (Task) mixed ANCOVA was conducted. Participant age was
used as a covariate. No main effect of task or group was found. No relationship
between task and age was observed. There was however a significant interaction
between task and group [F1,25 = 4.507, p = .044]. Controls were more accurate, and
therefore showed an advantage, on the identity matching task relative to the emotion
matching task [F1,18 = 5.10, p = .037]. Synaesthetes did not show this pattern -
analysis of within-subject effects revealed no significant difference between the two
tasks for the synaesthetic group [F1,6 = .759, p = .417]. There was also a non-
significant trend for synaesthetes to outperform controls on the expression matching
task (Figure 5.5a), but for controls to outperform synaesthetes on the identity
matching task (Figure 5.5b).
5.4 GENERAL DISCUSSION
This study investigated expression and identity face processing in mirror-touch
synaesthetes and non-synaesthete control participants. It was predicted that
heightened sensorimotor simulation mechanisms would result in superior expression
recognition, but would not affect the identity recognition abilities of mirror-touch
synaesthetes. Consistent with these predictions, mirror-touch synaesthetes were
superior when recognizing the facial expressions, but not facial identities of others.
These findings are consistent with simulation accounts of expression recognition
which suggest that in order to understand another’s emotional expressions individuals
must simulate the sensorimotor response associated with generating the perceived
facial expression (Adolphs, 2002; Adolphs, 2003; Gallese, Keysers, and Rizzolatti, G,
2004; Goldman, and Sripada, 2005; Keysers and Gazzola, 2006).