Face to face with pain.
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Drug and Narcotic Control↗
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Face to face. Interview by Eileen Fursland.
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Humans↗
Face to face.
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Adaptation, Psychological↗
Face to face. Interview by Eileen Fursland.
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Faculty↗
The perception of face gender: the role of stimulus structure in recognition and classification.
The perception of face gender was examined in the context of extending "face space" models of human face representations to include the perceptual categories defined by male and female faces. We collected data on the recognizability, gender classifiability (reaction time to classify a face as male/female), attractiveness, and masculinity/femininity of individual male and female faces. Factor analyses applied separately to the data for male and female faces yielded the following results. First, for both male and female faces, the recognizability and gender classifiability of faces were independent--a result inconsistent with the hypothesis that both recognizability and gender classifiability depend on a face's "distance" from the subcategory gender prototype. Instead, caricatured aspects of gender (femininity/masculinity ratings) related to the gender classifiability of the faces. Second, facial attractiveness related inversely to face recognizability for male, but not for female, faces--a result that resolves inconsistencies in previous studies. Third, attractiveness and femininity for female faces were nearly equivalent, but attractiveness and masculinity for male faces were not equivalent. Finally, we applied principal component analysis to the pixel-coded face images with the aim of extracting measures related to the gender classifiability and recognizability of individual faces. We incorporated these model-derived measures into the factor analysis with the human rating and performance measures. This combined analysis indicated that face recognizability is related to the distinctiveness of a face with respect to its gender subcategory prototype. Additionally, the gender classifiability of faces related to at least one caricatured aspect of face gender.
Analysis of Variance↗
Face processing in humans and new world monkeys: the influence of experiential and ecological factors.
This study tests whether the face-processing system of humans and a nonhuman primate species share characteristics that would allow for early and quick processing of socially salient stimuli: a sensitivity toward conspecific faces, a sensitivity toward highly practiced face stimuli, and an ability to generalize changes in the face that do not suggest a new identity, such as a face differently oriented. The look rates by adult tamarins and humans toward conspecific and other primate faces were examined to determine if these characteristics are shared. A visual paired comparison (VPC) task presented subjects with either a human face, chimpanzee face, tamarin face, or an object as a sample, and then a pair containing the previous stimulus and a novel stimulus was presented. The stimuli were either presented all in an upright orientation, or all in an inverted orientation. The novel stimulus in the pair was either an orientation change of the same face/object or a new example of the same type of face/object, and the stimuli were shown either in an upright orientation or in an inverted orientation. Preference to novelty scores revealed that humans attended most to novel individual human faces, and this effect decreased significantly if the stimuli were inverted. Tamarins showed preferential looking toward novel orientations of previously seen tamarin faces in the upright orientation, but not in an inverted orientation. Similarly, their preference to look longer at novel tamarin and human faces within the pair was reduced significantly with inverted stimuli. The results confirmed prior findings in humans that novel human faces generate more attention in the upright than in the inverted orientation. The monkeys also attended more to faces of conspecifics, but showed an inversion effect to orientation change in tamarin faces and to identity changes in tamarin and human faces. The results indicate configural processing restricted to particular kinds of primate faces by a New World monkey species, with configural processing influenced by life experience (human faces and tamarin faces) and specialized to process orientation changes specific to conspecific faces.
Adolescent↗
Information processing during face recognition: the effects of familiarity, inversion, and morphing on scanning fixations.
Where we make ocular fixations when viewing an object likely reflects interactions between 'external' object properties and internal 'top-down' factors, as our perceptual system tests hypotheses and attempts to make decisions about our environment. These scanning fixation patterns can tell us how and where the visual system gathers information critical to specific tasks. We determined the effects of the internal factors of expertise, experience, and ambiguity on scanning during a face-recognition task, in eight subjects. To assess the effects of expertise, we compared upright with inverted faces, since it is hypothesized that inverted faces do not access an orientation-dependent face-expert processor. To assess the effects of experience, we compared famous with novel faces, as famous faces would have stronger internal representations than anonymous ones. Ambiguity in matching seen and remembered faces was manipulated with morphed faces. We measured three classes of variables: (i) total scanning time and fixations; (ii) the spatial distribution of scanning; and (iii) the sequence of scanning, using first-order Markov matrices for local scan structure and string editing for global scan structure. We found that, with inverted faces, subjects redistributed fixations to the mouth and lower face, and their local and global scan structure became more random. With novel or morphed faces, they scanned the eyes and upper face more. Local scan structure was not affected by familiarity, but global scan structure was least random (most stereotyped) for novel upright faces. We conclude that expertise (upright faces) leads to less lower-face scanning and more predictable global patterns of information gathering. Experience (famous faces) leads to less upper-face scanning and more idiosyncratic global scan structures, suggesting a superseding influence of facial memories. With morphed faces, subjects return to the upper face to resolve ambiguity, implying a greater importance of this region in face recognition.
Adult↗
The brain response to personally familiar faces in autism: findings of fusiform activity and beyond.
Past functional MRI (FMRI) studies of autism have reported reduced activation in response to the faces of strangers primarily in the 'fusiform face area' (FFA). An alternative and potentially stronger test of FFA function in autism is one that attempts to affect levels of FFA activity using factors believed to modulate function in this brain region, such as face familiarity and the perception of face identity. The current study presented personally meaningful faces, such as mother and co-worker, as well as stranger faces in a rapid event-related FMRI design. Seven autistic and nine normal control adults participated and pressed a button in response to all female faces. A deconvolution analysis revealed significant FFA activity in response to familiar and stranger faces in both autism and normal control groups. Individuals with autism also showed greater fusiform activity in response to familiar faces than stranger faces, as well as the prototypical right hemisphere dominance in response to both types of faces. Normal subjects showed additional activation to familiar faces in the posterior cingulate, amygdala and medial frontal lobes, including the anterior cingulate. Subjects with autism showed a similar, but more limited, network in response to familiar faces. This network included the amygdala and implies that this structure, involved in multiple socio-emotional functions, can be responsive in autism in the presence of stimuli that represent high reward value, such as mother's face. Furthermore, the presence of a distinct network to process familiar faces in autism, one that included limbic structures and was not found in response to the faces of strangers, suggests socio-emotional processing in autism. A potentially noteworthy trend, however, was evidence for a reduction in medial frontal lobe function in the autism group. The main finding of FFA activity in autism stands in contrast to most past FMRI studies of face processing in this disorder. This positive result may reflect the use of personally significant faces that enhanced attention and motivation in the autistic participants. Furthermore, given the proposed role of the FFA in establishing person identity, the use of almost a dozen different personally familiar faces for each participant (totalling 32 non-repeating faces) may have additionally maximized FFA involvement. Therefore, dysfunction in the FFA found in other studies of autism may reflect defects in systems that modulate the FFA, rather than the FFA itself.
Adolescent↗
Structural encoding of human and schematic faces: holistic and part-based processes.
The range of specificity and the response properties of the extrastriate face area were investigated by comparing the N170 event-related potential (ERP) component elicited by photographs of natural faces, realistically painted portraits, sketches of faces, schematic faces, and by nonface meaningful and meaningless visual stimuli. Results showed that the N170 distinguished between faces and nonface stimuli when the concept of a face was clearly rendered by the visual stimulus, but it did not distinguish among different face types: Even a schematic face made from simple line fragments triggered the N170. However, in a second experiment, inversion seemed to have a different effect on natural faces in which face components were available and on the pure gestalt-based schematic faces: The N170 amplitude was enhanced when natural faces were presented upside down but reduced when schematic faces were inverted. Inversion delayed the N170 peak latency for both natural and schematic faces. Together, these results suggest that early face processing in the human brain is subserved by a multiple-component neural system in which both whole-face configurations and face parts are processed. The relative involvement of the two perceptual processes is probably determined by whether the physiognomic value of the stimuli depends upon holistic configuration, or whether the individual components can be associated with faces even when presented outside the face context.
Adult↗
Self-face recognition in attended and unattended conditions: an event-related brain potential study.
This study investigated whether neural mechanisms of self-face recognition are modulated by attention by recording event-related brain potentials associated with self-face recognition. Participants identified head orientations of self-faces and familiar or unfamiliar other faces presented briefly at the center of the visual field. Event-related brain potentials to self-faces and other faces were recorded when self-faces and familiar or unfamiliar other faces were either task relevant (attended) or irrelevant (unattended) in separate blocks of trials. We found that early face-specific event-related brain potential components such as the N170 and vertex positive potential did not differ between self-faces and other faces. Relative to familiar faces, however, self-faces induced an increased positivity over the frontocentral area at 220-700 ms. The increased positivity to self-faces relative to familiar faces between 500 and 700 ms was reduced in the attended relative to the unattended conditions, which arose from the fact that the amplitude to familiar faces during this time window was increased in the attended relative to the unattended conditions, whereas the event-related brain potential amplitude to self-faces was not influenced by attention. The event-related brain potential results suggest an automatic process of self-face recognition in human brains that occurs after face structure encoding and is independent of task relevance.
Adult↗
The responses of neurons in the temporal cortex of primates, and face identification and detection.
The ability of a human observer to detect the presence of a briefly flashed picture of a face can depend on the picture's spatial configuration, that is on whether its features are rearranged (jumbled) or are in their normal configuration. The face-detection effect (FDE) is found under conditions of backward masking, when the presence of a face can be detected with shorter masking intervals when it is in the normal than when in the rear-ranged configuration. A similar effect is found when the subject is asked to classify the face as rearranged or not - the face-classification effect (FCE). Part of the interest of the FDE and the FCE is that they show how the configuration of a stimulus can be an important factor in the perceptual processing which leads to detection and classification of the stimulus. To analyse these effects we recorded from single neurons in the cortex in the superior temporal sulcus of macaques when they were shown (in a visual fixation task) normal and rearranged faces under backward masking conditions shown in experiments 2 and 3 to produce, with the same apparatus, the FCE, and also to produce comparable effects on the identification of which face was present (called hereafter the face-identification effect), and also of the clarity of the face. We found in experiment 1 that there are some face-selective neurons which respond to faces only, or better, when the features in the faces are in their normal configuration rather than rearranged. We also showed in this experiment that the difference in the response to the normal as compared to the rearranged faces became greater when the masking stimulus was delayed more. Thus, at intermediate delays, there are more neurons active for the normal than for the rearranged face. We therefore propose that the FDE, the FCE, and the face-identification effect arise because the total number of neurons activated by faces in their normal configuration is greater than that activated by rearranged faces, because of the sensitivity of some face-selective neurons to the spatial arrangement of the features. The experiments also show that backward visual masking does produce abrupt termination of the firing of neurons in the temporal cortical visual system, so that the duration of a neuronal response is very short when visual stimuli can just be perceived.
Analysis of Variance↗
Recovery from adaptation to facial identity is larger for upright than inverted faces in the human occipito-temporal cortex.
Human faces look more similar to each other when they are presented upside-down, leading to an increase of error rates and response times during individual face discrimination tasks. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test the hypothesis that this perceived similarity leads to a lower recovery from identity adaptation for inverted faces than for upright faces in face-sensitive areas of the occipito-temporal cortex. Ten subjects were presented with blocks of upright and inverted faces, with the same face identity repeated consecutively in half of the blocks, and different facial identities repeated in the other blocks. When face stimuli were presented upright, the percent signal change in the bilateral middle fusiform gyrus (MFG) was larger for different faces as compared to same faces, replicating previous observations of a recovery from facial identity adaptation in this region. However, there was no significant recovery from adaptation when different inverted faces were presented. Most interestingly, the difference in activation between upright and inverted faces increased progressively during a block when different facial identities were presented. A similar pattern of activation was found in the left middle fusiform gyrus, but was less clear-cut in bilateral face-sensitive areas of the inferior occipital cortex. These findings show that the differential level of activation to upright and inverted faces in the fusiform gyrus is mainly due to a difference in recovery from adaptation, and they explain the discrepancies in the results reported in previous fMRI studies which compared the processing of upright and inverted faces. The lack of recovery from adaptation for inverted faces in the fusiform gyrus may underlie the face inversion effect (FIE), which takes place during perceptual encoding of individual face representations.
Adaptation, Psychological↗
On the other side of the mean: the perception of dissimilarity in human faces.
We created a 'face space' using a laser-scan representation of faces. In this space, a caricature can be made by moving a face away from the average face, along the line connecting the particular face to the average face. Here, we move the face along this line in the other direction, proceeding through the mean and 'out the other side'. This results in a face that is 'opposite', in a computational sense, to the original face. We morphed several faces into their anti-faces and sampled the morph trajectory in five discrete steps. We then collected similarity ratings from human participants for all possible pairs of morphed faces to determine how the distances in the 'physical face space' related to the distances in the 'psychological face space'. The data indicate that there is a perceptual discontinuity of face identity as the face crosses over to the 'other side of the mean'. We consider these results in the context of face-space models of human face processing.
Adult↗
Brain waves following remembered faces index conscious recollection.
At a glance, one can often determine whether a face belongs to a known individual. To investigate brain mechanisms underlying this memory feat, we recorded EEG signals time-locked to face presentations. In the study phase, 40 unknown faces were presented, 20 of which were accompanied by a voice simulating that person speaking. Instructions were to remember the faces with spoken biographical information (R-faces) and to forget the others (F-faces). In the test phase, famous and non-famous faces were presented in a visually degraded manner. Subjects made two-choice fame judgments and priming was observed in the form of faster and more accurate responses for old than for new non-famous faces. Priming did not differ between R-faces and F-faces. In a second experiment, faces were not degraded at test and behavioral responses were made only when faces were presented twice in immediate succession. Brain potentials elicited 300 to 900 ms after stimulus onset from frontal and parieto-occipital scalp regions were larger for R-faces than for F-faces. Recognition tested later was more accurate for R-faces than for F-faces. Because the study-phase manipulation influenced recognition but not priming, we conclude that this procedure succeeded in isolating neural correlates of recollective processing from more automatic uses of face memory as indexed by priming.
Acoustic Stimulation↗
Spectacles, distinctiveness, and face recognition: a web-based experiment.
This study sought to clarify previous research in the face recognition literature regarding memory for faces with spectacles. A second aim of this research was to further investigate Valentine's face-space model, a leading model of face recognition that predicts better performance on distinctive faces compared to typical faces. Prior to this experiment, independent observers provided distinctiveness ratings for faces with, and without, spectacles. Experimental participants then accessed the PsychExperiments website and completed a face recognition experiment. Based on the judgments of the independent observers, the face-space model predicts that memory for spectacled faces should be superior to memory for non-spectacled faces. An analysis of hit rate (percent correct) supported this notion, as a higher hit rate was observed for spectacled faces compared to non-spectacled faces. However, the analysis of false alarms (false identifications) did not support the predictions made by the face-space model, as participants demonstrated reliably higher false alarm rates for faces with spectacles. A further analysis of response bias suggests that the overall pattern of responding may have been largely due to changes in response criteria for trials where spectacled faces were presented. Implications for models of face recognition are discussed.
Adolescent↗
Recognition of own-race and other-race faces by three-month-old infants.
BACKGROUND: People are better at recognizing faces of their own race than faces of another race. Such race specificity may be due to differential expertise in the two races. METHOD: In order to find out whether this other-race effect develops as early as face-recognition skills or whether it is a long-term effect of acquired expertise, we tested face recognition in 3-month-old Caucasian infants by conducting two experiments using Caucasian and Asiatic faces and a visual pair-comparison task. We hypothesized that if the other race effect develops together with face processing skills during the first months of life, the ability to recognize own-race faces will be greater than the ability to recognize other-race faces: 3-month-old Caucasian infants should be better at recognizing Caucasian faces than Asiatic faces. If, on the contrary, the other-race effect is the long-term result of acquired expertise, no difference between recognizing own- and other-race faces will be observed at that age. RESULTS: In Experiment 1, Caucasian infants were habituated to a single face. Recognition was assessed by a novelty preference paradigm. The infants' recognition performance was better for Caucasian than for Asiatic faces. In Experiment 2, Caucasian infants were familiarized with three individual faces. Recognition was demonstrated with both Caucasian and Asiatic faces. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that (i) the representation of face information by 3-month-olds may be race-experience-dependent (Experiment 1), and (ii) short-term familiarization with exemplars of another race group is sufficient to reduce the other-race effect and to extend the power of face processing (Experiment 2).
Child Development↗
Face recognition as a function of social attention in non-human primates: an ERP study.
Epidural event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from four squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) during the presentation of pictoral stimuli that comprised real human and monkey faces. Subjects viewed tachistoscopically presented stimuli belonging to four different categories: familiar and unfamiliar human faces, and familiar and unfamiliar monkey faces. Familiar faces were subcategorized into top, middle and bottom according to the perceived individual's dominance ranking in a social hierarchy, as rated by human judges observing the group's social behavior. Waveform peak components to monkey and human faces showed similarities in their spatial distribution. However, larger amplitude N1 and N2 components were elicited in response to monkey compared to human faces, particularly over lateral temporo-parietal sites. A similar trend was observed for the P3 component, with maximal differences along midline electrode site. Responses to familiar and unfamiliar monkey faces showed larger N1s to familiar monkey faces and larger P3s to unfamiliar monkey faces. N1 and P3 components elicited by human faces showed no significant differences between conditions. N2 amplitudes were larger over posterior sites for top-ranked monkeys and larger over frontal sites for middle- and bottom-ranked monkeys. Top-ranked human faces elicited the largest N2 components, middle-ranked faces the next largest, and bottom-ranked faces the smallest. N1, N2, and P3 latencies were similarly sensitive to the ranking of human but not monkey faces. These data suggest that non-human primates exhibit evoked potentials to conspecific and non-conspecific faces that are similar in morphology but different in function. Larger amplitude responses to monkey faces suggests increased processing for that category of stimuli. Additionally, monkey ERPs reflect familiarity with conspecifics but not with human faces. Finally, the social status of the perceived individual, or at least the perceived threat posed by an individual, affects the latencies and magnitudes of ERP components produced by the viewer. These data are consistent with social attention hypotheses which propose that higher status (i.e. more dominant or socially meaningful) members of a group receive more attention than lower status individuals.
Animals↗
Inversion and contrast polarity reversal affect both encoding and recognition processes of unfamiliar faces: a repetition study using ERPs.
Using ERPs in a face recognition task, we investigated whether inversion and contrast reversal, which seem to disrupt different aspects of face configuration, differentially affected encoding and memory for faces. Upright, inverted, and negative (contrast-reversed) unknown faces were either immediately repeated (0-lag) or repeated after 1 intervening face (1-lag). The encoding condition (new) consisted of the first presentation of items correctly recognized in the two repeated conditions. 0-lag faces were recognized better and faster than 1-lag faces. Inverted and negative pictures elicited longer reaction times, lower hit rates, and higher false alarm rates than upright faces. ERP analyses revealed that negative and inverted faces affected both early (encoding) and late (recognition) stages of face processing. Early components (N170, VPP) were delayed and enhanced by both inversion and contrast reversal which also affected P1 and P2 components. Amplitudes were higher for inverted faces at frontal and parietal sites from 350 to 600 ms. Priming effects were seen at encoding stages, revealed by shorter latencies and smaller amplitudes of N170 for repeated stimuli, which did not differ depending on face type. Repeated faces yielded more positive amplitudes than new faces from 250 to 450 ms frontally and from 400 to 600 ms parietally. However, ERP differences revealed that the magnitude of this repetition effect was smaller for negative and inverted than upright faces at 0-lag but not at 1-lag condition. Thus, face encoding and recognition processes were affected by inversion and contrast-reversal differently.
Brain↗