Seminar organized by ICI: Individual Differences in Face Cognition-Psychometrics and Neural Underpinnings

Prof. Werner Sommer, Professor in Biological Psychology and psychophysiology, and in the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Life Science, Humboldt-University of Berlin, gave a talk entitled ” Individual Differences in Face Cognition-Psychometrics and Neural Underpinnings ” on 28 November 2019, which was organized by Institute of Collaborative Innovation. At the seminar, Prof. Werner Sommer introduced the significance of fast and accurate processing of faces (person identity, emotion, eye gaze, speech movement, gender, attractiveness) for human communication and interaction. Then Prof. Werner Sommer shared that although much work has been done on the general process and mechanisms of this astonishing human ablity, there is much less research om the large differences between persons and even less on the underlying neural mechanisms. During the last ten years, professor with his team have studied both questions in a number of large-scale experiments. Prof. Werner Sommer summarized their results about the cognitive structure of face cognition and whether it is affected by age and gender and reported their research on the neural mechanisms of individual differences in face cognition, as reflected in event-related brain potentials. Finally, Prof. Werner Sommer talked about recent endeavours to capture neural correlates of eyes gaze/contact and the voluntary production of emotional expressions and whether they are modulated by recent motherhood. The lecture attracted many scholars and students from the University of Macau. During the Q&A session, the participants exchanged ideas and warmly academic discussions.