Everyday, people flexibly perform different categorizations of common faces, objects and scenes. Intuition and scattered evidence suggest that these categorizations require the use of different visual information from the input. However, there is no unifying method, based on the categorization performance of subjects, that can isolate the information used. To this end, we developed Bubbles, a general technique that can assign the credit of human categorization performance to specific visual information. To illustrate the technique, we applied Bubbles on three categorization tasks (gender, expressive or not and identity) on the same set of faces, with human and ideal observers to compare the features they used.

Bubbles: A Technique to Reveal the Use of Information in Recognition Tasks EOA Report

COVID-19 lockdown measures have profoundly impacted adolescent' daily life, with research suggesting an increase in irritability, stress, loneliness, and family conflict. A potential protective factor is parent-child relationship quality; however, no studies have investigated this. We used data from SIGMA, a longitudinal, experience sampling cohort study, in which N = 173 adolescents aged 11 to 20 were tested before and during COVID-19. Multilevel analyses showed decreased daily-life irritability and increased loneliness from pre- to mid-pandemic. Daily-life stress levels were unchanged. Relationship quality was negatively associated with irritability and loneliness and buffered against the increase in loneliness. Effect sizes were small and do not support a strong effect of the first lockdown on irritability, stress, loneliness, and family conflict in adolescents.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jora.12657

The Impact of COVID-19 on Adolescents' Daily Lives: The Role of Parent-Child Relationship Quality.

Members of the Society for Research on Adolescents COVID-19 Response Team offer this commentary to accompany this special issue of the Journal of Research on Adolescence regarding the impact of the pandemic on adolescents' social, emotional, and academic functioning. In addition to outlining the critical need for scholarly collaboration to address the global impact of this crisis on adolescent development, we argue that a broad investigative lens is needed to guide research and recovery efforts targeting youth development. We then use this broad lens to consider dimensions of the pandemic impact relative to developmental implications within community and policy contexts, educational contexts, social contexts, and family contexts. Finally, we describe guideposts for setting a global, shared research agenda that can hasten research to recovery efforts surrounding the pandemic and youth development.

Adolescence Amid a Pandemic: Short- and Long-Term Implications.

Super-Recognizers - a novel diagnostic framework, 70 cases, and guidelines for future work.

Family relationship quality during the COVID-19 pandemic: The value of adolescent perceptions of change.

Social withdrawal is often presented as overall negative, with a focus on loneliness and peer exclusion. However, social withdrawal is also a part of normative adolescent development, which indicates that groups of adolescents potentially experience social withdrawal differently from one another. This study investigated whether different groups of adolescents experienced social withdrawal in daily life as positive versus negative, using experience sampling data from a large-scale study on mental health in general population adolescents aged 11 to 20 (n = 1913, MAge = 13.8, SDAge = 1.9, 63% female) from the Flemish region in Belgium. Two social withdrawal clusters were identified using model-based cluster analysis: one cluster characterized by high levels of positive affect and one cluster characterized by high levels of negative affect, loneliness and exclusion. Logistic regression showed that boys had 66% decreased odds of belonging to the negative cluster. These results show that daily-life social withdrawal experiences are heterogeneous in adolescence, which strengthens the view that, both in research and clinical practice, social withdrawal should not be seen as necessarily maladaptive. 

https://pure.eur.nl/ws/files/50010236/Bamps2022_Article_IdentifyingClustersOfAdolescen.pdf

Identifying Clusters of Adolescents Based on Their Daily-Life Social Withdrawal Experience

Changes in daily-life social processes and psychopathology symptoms in Flemish youth from before to during the COVID-19 pandemic

Over recent years, multivariate pattern analysis (“decoding”) approaches have become increasingly used to investigate “when” and “where” our brains conduct meaningful processes about their visual environments. Studies using time-resolved decoding of M/EEG patterns have described numerous processes such as object/face familiarity and the emergence of basic-to-abstract category information. Surprisingly, no study has, to our knowledge, revealed “what” (i.e. the actual visual information that) our brain uses while these computations are examined by decoding algorithms. Here, we revealed the time course at which our brain extracts realistic category-specific information about visual objects (i.e. emotion-type & gender information from faces) with time-resolved decoding of high-density EEG patterns, as well as carefully controlled tasks and visual stimulation. Then, we derived temporal generalization matrices and showed that category-specific information is 1) first diffused across brain areas (250 to 350 ms) and 2) encoded under a stable neural pattern that suggests evidence accumulation (350 to 650 ms after face onset). Finally, we bridged time-resolved decoding with psychophysics and revealed the specific visual information (spatial frequency, feature position & orientation information) that support these brain computations. Doing so, we uncovered interconnected dynamics between visual features, and the accumulation and diffusion of category-specific information in the brain.

Eva Bamps

Papers

The Impact of COVID-19 on Adolescents' Daily Lives: The Role of Parent-Child Relationship Quality.

Identifying Clusters of Adolescents Based on Their Daily-Life Social Withdrawal Experience

Changes in daily-life social processes and psychopathology symptoms in Flemish youth from before to during the COVID-19 pandemic

Visual representations supporting category-specific information about visual objects in the brain

Multivariate pattern analysis reveals domain-general enhancement of visual representations in individuals with “super-recognition” of faces