Electrophysiological correlates of face-evoked person knowledge

Abstract

Face recognition includes identifying a face as perceptually familiar and recollecting biographical information, or person-knowledge, associated with the face. The majority of studies examining the neural basis of face recognition have confounded these stages by comparing brain responses evoked by novel and perceptually familiar famous faces. Here, we recorded EEG in two tasks in which subjects viewed two sets of faces that were equally perceptually familiar, but which had differing levels of associated person-knowledge. Our results dissociated the effects of person-knowledge from perceptual familiarity. Faces with associated biographical information elicited a larger ~600 ms centroparietal positivity in both a passive viewing task in which subjects viewed faces without explicitly responding, and an active question-answering task in which subjects indicated whether or not they knew particular facts about the faces. In the question task only, person-knowledge was associated with a negative ERP difference over right posterior scalp over the 170–450 ms interval which appeared again at long latency (>900 ms).

Differential effects of face-realism and emotion on event-related brain potentials and their implications for the uncanny valley theory

“…Indeed, person-related semantic information enhances LPP amplitudes56. Recently, it has been further shown that biographical information can increase the LPP to computer-generated faces58. Although we did not provide participants with explicit biographical information, as a result of social inferences, the more realistic faces might be perceived as having a unique biographical identity.…”

“…In this vein, manipulating perceived uniqueness or distinctiveness via shape or reflectance manipulations of initially non-distinctive real faces has been found to result in a larger late positivity as well as a better memory performance5455. Further, biographical information facilitates the processing of real faces at late ERP components5657, which has recently also been shown for realistic computer generated faces58. The combined evidence suggests that a unique identity, either pre-existing or ascribed, enhances processing particularly at late stages.…”

Face Recognition Deficits in a Patient With Alzheimer's Disease: Amnesia or Agnosia? The Importance of Electrophysiological Markers for Differential Diagnosis

“…To further investigate this possibility, we took advantage of electrophysiology and, specifically, event-related potentials (ERPs) to provide reliable neural markers capable of characterizing the neuropsychological profile of cognitive deficits (Rossini et al, 2020 ). As regards face processing, three main components have been found to correlate with face processing: the N170 (Bötzel et al, 1995 ; Bentin et al, 1996 ), the N250 (Schweinberger et al, 1995 , 2004 ), and the N400 components (Bentin and Deouell, 2000 ; Olivares et al, 2015 ; Taylor et al, 2016 ). Although the evidence is somewhat controversial, some studies have also suggested that the P100 may be sensitive to face processing, reflecting either a holistic face perception or differential low-level visual features between faces and other complex visual stimuli (Itier and Taylor, 2004 ; Rossion and Jacques, 2008 ).…”

“…Unlike N170, the N250 and N400 components are modulated by personal familiarity (Bentin and Deouell, 2000 ; Webb et al, 2010 ; Olivares et al, 2015 ; Taylor et al, 2016 ). Therefore, they are both considered as indexes of face identification processing, albeit underpinning different aspects.…”

A decisional space account of saccadic reaction times towards personally familiar faces

“…Similarly, studies reporting early modulation for famous faces often involve stimulus selection based on subjects' previously assessed level of familiarity with various famous individuals (Huang et al, 2017). Lastly, studies using experimentally learned faces have also reported familiarity-dependent modulation of early components (Taylor et al, 2016). In all of these studies pre-activation of identity information can be regarded as defining the decisional space from which to-be-presented identities are drawn.…”