ArticleeLife2020
Efficient recognition of facial expressions does not require motor simulation.
Article in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Facial palsy reveals the sensorimotor contribution to facial-emotion recognition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Deliberate Facial Mimicry As a Skill That Predicts Emotion Recognition Performance.Affective science · 2026Article
- Recognition of facial expressions from minimal five-point-light displays.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Effortless facial expression recognition without motor simulation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Are patients with Parkinson's disease impaired in the recognition of emotion's authenticity?Journal of neuropsychology · 2025Article
- Children with facial differences experience deficits in emotion skills.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2025Article
- On the Role of Sensorimotor Experience in Facial Expression Perception.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2024Review
- [Relationship between severity of hypomimia and basic emotion recognition in Parkinson's disease].Revista de neurologia · 2024Article
- Facial representations of complex affective states combining pain and a negative emotion.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Perception of emotionally incongruent cues: evidence for overreliance on body vs. face expressions in Parkinson's disease.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Inability to move one's face dampens facial expression perception.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2023Article
- Effector-specific motor simulation supplements core action recognition processes in adverse conditions.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Testing EEG functional connectivity between sensorimotor and face processing visual regions in individuals with congenital facial palsy.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2023Article
- Degenerate pathway for processing smile and other emotional expressions in congenital facial palsy: an hdEEG investigation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
What mechanisms underlie facial expression recognition? A popular hypothesis holds that efficient facial expression recognition cannot be achieved by visual analysis alone but additionally requires a mechanism of motor simulation - an unconscious, covert imitation of the observed facial postures and movements. Here, we first discuss why this hypothesis does not necessarily follow from extant empirical evidence. Next, we report experimental evidence against the central premise of this view: we demonstrate that individuals can achieve normotypical efficient facial expression recognition despite a congenital absence of relevant facial motor representations and, therefore, unaided by motor simulation. This underscores the need to reconsider the role of motor simulation in facial expression recognition.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.