Motion’s privilege in recognizing facial expressions following treatment for blindness

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.