The Effect of Body Expressions on the Learning Process and Facial Recognition among Healthy Participants and Individuals with Traumatic Brain Injury: Examination Using Eye Movements

Objective: Context-dependent effect (CDE) is a process by which reinstating at test the original learning context enhances the recall ability of the material being studied. Although recognition by people with traumatic brain injury (TBI) is poorer than that of healthy controls, both groups show CDE equally. In the current study, we seek to test the effect of body emotional expressions as contextual information, on facial recognition, and eye movements. Method: Twenty-four healthy individuals and 27 patients with moderate-to-severe TBI participated in the study. Participants were exposed to photos of people with neutral facial and body expressions and were asked to remember the people for a subsequent memory test. In the testing session, they were asked to determine whether the person presented to them had appeared before, under two conditions: (1) where the context remains constant (facial and body expressions remained neutral–Repeat condition) and (2) where the context changes (facial expression remained neutral but the body expression changed to angry or happy–Re-pair condition). Results: While the memory of the individuals with TBI was poorer than that of the controls, both groups exhibited equal CDE. We found that both groups, controls more than TBI, spent most of their time looking at the head. Furthermore, longer dwell time was associated with better recognition in the study phase. Conclusions: These findings are consistent with previous studies showing that despite impaired memory following TBI compared to a control group, CDE was preserved. The current study extends the context effect to body postures that express emotion.