Neuroimaging studies on recognition of personally familiar people

The social life of voices: studying the neural bases for the expression and perception of the self and others during spoken communication

“…For example, personally familiar voices have engaged responses in anterior regions of the temporal lobe, the precuneus and frontal poles (e.g., Nakamura et al, 2001 ; Shah et al, 2001 ), which in other literatures have been associated with autobiographical memory and the “social brain” (concerned with the processing of mental states and intentions in others; Blakemore, 2008 ). To date, however, the use of sets of “commonly familiar” voices including a mix of friends, colleagues, relatives or celebrities has enabled the identification of overall responses to familiarity in vocal signals, but has limited the investigation of the higher-order meaning of those individual voices as social signals for the listener (Sugiura, 2014 ). Thus, to literature on familiar voice processing has so far offered no clues as to the neural basis for the significance of voices as described in the London Underground story above.…”

Social recognition in rats and mice requires integration of olfactory, somatosensory and auditory cues

“…Both mice and rats were commercially obtained (Envigo, Israel). Mice subjects were naïve C57BL/6J adult (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15) week-old) male mice, while stimuli mice were C57BL/6J juvenile (21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30) day-old) male mice, naïve adult male and female C57BL/6J mice and ICR (CD1) male mice.…”

“…In humans, social recognition can be based on cues detected by single sensory modalities. For example, humans can recognize a familiar person just by looking at their face (visual modality) or hearing their voice (auditory modality) [7][8][9] . Moreover, human social recognition can occur even without active engagement with a social partner, such as by looking at a sleeping individual.…”

Idiosyncratic, retinotopic bias in face identification modulated by familiarity

“…We spend most of our days interacting with acquaintances, family and close friends. Because of these repeated and protracted interactions, the representation of personally familiar faces is rich and complex, as reflected by stronger and more widespread neural activation in the distributed face processing network, as compared to responses to unfamiliar faces (Gobbini and Haxby, 2007; Taylor et al, 2009; Gobbini, 2010; Natu and O’Toole, 2011; Bobes et al, 2013; Sugiura, 2014; Ramon and Gobbini, 2017; Visconti di Oleggio Castello et al, 2017a). Differences in representations are also reflected in faster detection and more robust recognition of familiar faces (Burton et al, 1999; Gobbini et al, 2013; Ramon et al, 2015; Visconti di Oleggio Castello and Gobbini, 2015; Guntupalli and Gobbini, 2017; Visconti di Oleggio Castello et al, 2017b).…”