Multiples studies have investigated the role of familiarity, emotion and novelty in the detection and recognition of human faces (see Natu & O'Toole, 2011 for a review). Gobbini & Haxby (2007) have suggested a model of familiar face recognition that describes how prior knowledge of a person's identity modulates the visual systems involved in processing personally familiar faces. Building on this proposed model, the present study sought to investigate the neural representation of personally familiar (friends) and unfamiliar (matched for age and gender strangers) faces. Thirty-three participants underwent functional MRI while performing an oddball detection task in which they were presented with faces of friends and strangers. Univariate GLM and MVPA classification searchlight results agreed with previous findings of greater activity for the processing of familiar faces within some core visual modules and emotion-related regions (e.g. amygdala and insular cortex) suggested by the model. In addition, MVPA exclusively detected differential involvement of regions of the prefrontal cortex and the anterior temporal lobe providing further evidence of distributed representations of person knowledge. Furthermore, MVPA results for identity classification identified a cluster in the right middle frontal gyrus which was sensitive to identity (across friends and strangers combined). This suggests that familiarity differentially modulates brain regions implicated previously in carrying biographic knowledge. The same analysis also identified right inferior frontal gyrus which was also not found to be modulated by familiarity. Future directions are the investigation of functional connectivity between identified regions and subject-specific traits associated with individual stimuli.
The distributed neural code for facial identity / Y. O. HALCHENKO; J. D. GORS; J. V. HAXBY; M. I. GOBBINI. - STAMPA. - (2012). (Intervento presentato al convegno SFN tenutosi a New Orleans, LA, USA nel 13-17 ottobre 2012).
The distributed neural code for facial identity
GOBBINI, MARIA IDA
2012
Abstract
Multiples studies have investigated the role of familiarity, emotion and novelty in the detection and recognition of human faces (see Natu & O'Toole, 2011 for a review). Gobbini & Haxby (2007) have suggested a model of familiar face recognition that describes how prior knowledge of a person's identity modulates the visual systems involved in processing personally familiar faces. Building on this proposed model, the present study sought to investigate the neural representation of personally familiar (friends) and unfamiliar (matched for age and gender strangers) faces. Thirty-three participants underwent functional MRI while performing an oddball detection task in which they were presented with faces of friends and strangers. Univariate GLM and MVPA classification searchlight results agreed with previous findings of greater activity for the processing of familiar faces within some core visual modules and emotion-related regions (e.g. amygdala and insular cortex) suggested by the model. In addition, MVPA exclusively detected differential involvement of regions of the prefrontal cortex and the anterior temporal lobe providing further evidence of distributed representations of person knowledge. Furthermore, MVPA results for identity classification identified a cluster in the right middle frontal gyrus which was sensitive to identity (across friends and strangers combined). This suggests that familiarity differentially modulates brain regions implicated previously in carrying biographic knowledge. The same analysis also identified right inferior frontal gyrus which was also not found to be modulated by familiarity. Future directions are the investigation of functional connectivity between identified regions and subject-specific traits associated with individual stimuli.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
