FACE AND BRAIN · Functional contributions of the dorsal stream to human face recognition
FP6 — Marie Curie Actions (Human Resources and Mobility)
- Duration
- 2007-04-01 → 2009-03-31
- EU contribution
- €169,365
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- IIF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Final Activity Report Summary - FACE AND BRAIN (Functional Contributions of the Dorsal Stream to Human Face Recognition)
Face perception plays an important role in social life. This research explored two issues related to face perception. The first is about learning new faces. Prior research has shown that when people actively explore and inspect the three-dimensional views of a face during learning, their memory of the new face is better than seeing the same views passively. In this project, we studied how the brain may react differently when an actively explored face is tested. We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during the learning and test trials of a face matching experiment. Compared to the baseline condition, the brain signals revealed a stronger reaction at the occipital region shortly after the test face was presented. This finding reflects an early processing advantage for faces learned through an active exploration. We also observed a greater ERP activity over the inferior temporal area of the brain. This was particularly evident over the right hemisphere. This area and ERP component are associated with attention and face identity processing. The second main issue in our research is about self-concept and how it affects self-face perception. It is well known that people from Western and Eastern cultures often have different ideas about the concept of self. Westerners tend to view the self as an autonomous entity, resulting in an independent self, whereas Easterners tend to emphasise the interconnectedness of human beings, resulting in an interdependent self. In a series of studies, we examined how this difference affects people's perception of their own face and their friend's face. First, we found that British participants responded much faster to their own face relative to a familiar face. In contrast, the difference in our Chinese participants was reduced. Second, we found that the difference between perception of self-face and another person's face can be temporarily modified if people are encouraged to think in terms of independent or interdependent self. Finally, our ERP and fMRI results revealed a profound cultural influence on the neural substrates of these behaviours.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Humans are constantly required by their species-typical environment to learn new faces for social interactions. One of unanswered issues in face learning is the role of active perception. Research to date has mainly relied on methods where observers are relatively passive viewers of face stimuli.This bears rather limited resemblance to face perception in the natural environment. Perception of a real face is an interactive process in the sense that the relative motion of the face and its observer determines the resulting viewpoint of the face. The observer may from time to time actively engage in this interaction to deliberately register certain desired facial features.A recent study by Liuetal. (submitted) has shown that such exploratory behaviour can help to achieve more robust memory of faces. The principal objective of this project is to examine the neural substrates of this behavioural advantage.The aim is to test the hypothesis that the dorsal stream of the human brain is more strongly involved in a n active condition where observers are allowed to explore the views of a face with a joystick than a passive condition where observers simply watch a replay of the same sequence of face stimuli generated by the active observers. Unlike the ventral stream, the role of the dorsal stream in face perception is not well known.We will use event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record neural activities of the dorsal stream during face learning. We predict that relative to the passive condition, the active condition will elicit stronger responses in regions associated with the dorsal stream.We will employ both recognition memory and face matching tasks to distinguish the role of active exploration involved in memory and perceptual identification of faces. Apart from face stimuli, we will also use object (chair) stimuli to determine whether the neural substrates involved in active exploration are face specific.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY OF HULL · HULLCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union