Face perception, recognition and priming were examined with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and scalp event-related potentials (ERPs). Face perception was associated with haemodynamic increases in regions including bilateral fusiform and right superior temporal cortices, and a right posterior negativity (N170), most likely generated in the superior temporal region. Face recognition was associated with haemodynamic increases in fusiform, medial frontal and orbitofrontal cortices, and with a frontocentral positivity from 550 ms poststimulus. Face repetition was associated with a positivity from 400 to 600 ms and behavioural priming. Repetition of familiar faces was also associated with earlier onset of the ERP familiarity effect, and haemodynamic decreases in fusiform cortex. These data support a multi-component model of face-processing, with priming arising from more than one stage.

No abstract

The unprecedented efforts to minimize the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic introduce a new arena for human face recognition in which faces are partially occluded with masks. Here, we tested the extent to which face masks change the way faces are perceived. To this end, we evaluated face processing abilities for masked and unmasked faces in a large online sample of adult observers (n = 496) using an adapted version of the Cambridge Face Memory Test, a validated measure of face perception abilities in humans. As expected, a substantial decrease in performance was found for masked faces. Importantly, the inclusion of masks also led to a qualitative change in the way masked faces are perceived. In particular, holistic processing, the hallmark of face perception, was disrupted for faces with masks, as suggested by a reduced inversion effect. Similar changes were found whether masks were included during the study or the test phases of the experiment. Together, we provide novel evidence for quantitative and qualitative alterations in the processing of masked faces that could have significant effects on daily activities and social interactions.

The effects of familiarity on selective attention for the identity and expression of faces were tested using Garner's speeded-classification task. In 2 experiments, participants classified expression (or identity) of familiar and unfamiliar faces while the irrelevant dimension of identity (or expression) was either held constant (baseline condition) or varied randomly (filtering condition). Selective attention was measured by the difference in performance between these 2 conditions. Failure of selective attention was larger for familiar than for unfamiliar faces. In addition, failure of selective attention was found both for identity and for expression judgments. These findings show that familiarity increases (he perceptual integrality between identity and expression, and they question previous studies arguing that identity judgments are always resistant to irrelevant variations in expression. The authors suggest that the systems processing identity and expression are interconnected in that facial identity serves as a reference from which expressions can be more easily derived.

The visual perception of object shape depends on 'holistic' processing in which a given dimension cannot be perceptually isolated from the other dimensions of the object. The visual control of action (such as grasping an object), however, which is mediated by cortical areas that are largely independent of those mediating conscious perception, must take into account only the most action-relevant dimension of an object without being misled by other non-relevant object features. Here we report the results of two experiments showing that vision for perception and vision for action deal with objects in a fundamentally different manner. We tested participants' ability to make perceptual judgements of the width of different rectangular objects or to grasp them across their width, while in both cases ignoring length. Participants could not ignore length when making perceptual judgements of width but they could completely ignore length when grasping the same objects. These results suggest that in situations in which the elementary dimensions of an object's shape are perceived in a holistic manner, the same dimensions are treated analytically when a visually guided action is directed at that same object.