Some emotions are harder to recognise than others and some individuals, such as those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), simply find it more difficult to recognise emotions generally. The EU-funded LearningEmotions project will explore whether the two phenomena may arise from a common source, that is, difficulties with learning patterns and their associations (i.e. statistical learning).
The project will quantify the variability of cues used to signal emotions from an audio-visual emotion database to compare whether difficult-to-recognise emotions have less consistent patterns than emotions that are easier to recognise.
The project will also compare autistic and non-autistic individuals on their ability to recognise emotions and learn patterns to see if the two abilities are related using behavioural and neural methods.
We also conduct research related to emotion perception among autistic individuals.