Detecting a viewer’s familiarity with a face: Evidence from event‐related brain potentials and classifier analyses

Abstract

Human observers are highly efficient at recognizing the faces of the people they know (e.g., Bruce & Young, 2012) and accomplish this task many times every day without apparent effort. Yet the complexity of the task becomes evident when comparing familiar to unfamiliar face recognition (Young & Burton, 2018). It is usually easy to see

No Semantic Information is Necessary to Evoke General Neural Signatures of Face Familiarity - Evidence from Cross-Experiment Classification

“…Both time-resolved cross-classification and searchlight analyses yielded above-chance familiarity effects when trained on data from the Personal Familiarization experiment and tested on the matching task of the Perceptual Familiarization experiment. This suggests that seeing a familiarized face automatically and reliably elicits a familiarity response (Wiese et al 2022). The earliest indication of above-chance classification was at 170 ms and was most pronounced over central-posterior sites.…”

Characterizing the shared signals of face familiarity: long-term acquaintance, voluntary control, and concealed knowledge

“…M/EEG studies (Dobs, Isik, Pantazis, & Kanwisher, 2019; Karimi-Rouzbahani, Ramezani, Woolgar, Rich, & Ghodrati, 2021; Wiese, Tüttenberg, et al, 2019) in the past years reported on an electrophysiological correlate of face-familiarity between 200 to 600 ms following stimulus presentation. In a recent analysis Dalski et al (Dalski, Kovács, & Ambrus, 2022a) used data from three experiments reported in a study by Ambrus et al (2021) to investigate whether these familiarity signals generalize across participants, stimuli, and modes of familiarization.…”

“…In a recent EEG investigation, Wiese et al (2022, Concealed Knowledge experiment) asked participants to acknowledge familiarity with a personally familiar identity, deny knowing another personally known identity, and give a truthful answer for a genuinely unfamiliar identity. This study mainly focused on two ERP components: the earlier N250 familiarity effect (Schweinberger & Neumann, 2016; Schweinberger, Pickering, Jentzsch, Burton, & Kaufmann, 2002), thought to reflect visual recognition of a known face, and the later sustained familiarity effect (SFE), hypothesized to be the marker of the integration of visual with additional identity-specific information (Wiese, Tüttenberg, et al, 2019). This study found that these components are present for both acknowledged and concealed stimuli; more specifically, measured over the TP9-TP10 and P9-P10 electrodes, they were found to be largely automatic in the ca.…”

“…This study found that these components are present for both acknowledged and concealed stimuli; more specifically, measured over the TP9-TP10 and P9-P10 electrodes, they were found to be largely automatic in the ca. 200 to 400 ms time window, and modulated by attentional resources in the 400 to 600 ms interval (see also Wiese, Ingram, et al, 2019).…”

“…To answer this question, we analyzed data from two EEG-ERP experiments described in aforementioned report by Wiese et al (2022). In the Incidental Recognition experiment, face-familiarity effects were explored using multiple images of long-term familiar and unfamiliar faces with an orthogonal target detection task.…”