Covert Processing of Faces in Prosopagnosia Is Restricted to Facial Expressions: Evidence from Cross-Modal Bias

Gelder, Béatrice de; Pourtois, Gilles; Vroomen, Jean; Bachoud-Levi, AC

doi:10.1006/brcg.1999.1203

Cited by 34 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…A striate cortex lesion is associated with loss of conscious vision, which might be assumed to be necessary for intersensory binding. Such a view is inconsistent with the finding that crossmodal effects can be covert (15). Beyond that, it fails to explain why there is a difference in binding between voices with scenes, on the one hand, and faces, on the other hand.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…Electrophysiological recordings of the time course of the crossmodal bias from the face to the voice indicated that such intersensory integration takes place on-line during auditory perception of emotion (12,13) and mainly translates as amplitude change of exogenous auditory components [i.e., early auditory potential (N1) and mismatch negativity (MMN)]. Importantly, facial expressions can bias perception of an affective tone of voice even when the face is not attended to (14) or cannot be perceived consciously, as is the case with brain damage to occipitotemporal areas (15). These latter findings indicate that the crossmodal effect does not depend on conscious recognition of the visual stimuli.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Fear recognition in the voice is modulated by unconsciously recognized facial expressions but not by unconsciously recognized affective pictures

Gelder

Pourtois

Weiskrantz

2002

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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108

102

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Multisensory integration is a powerful mechanism for increasing adaptive responses, as illustrated by binding of fear expressed in a face with fear present in a voice. To understand the role of awareness in intersensory integration of affective information we studied multisensory integration under conditions of conscious and nonconscious processing of the visual component of an audiovisual stimulus pair. Auditory-event-related potentials were measured in two patients (GY and DB) who were unable to perceive visual stimuli consciously because of striate cortex damage. To explore the role of conscious vision of audiovisual pairing, we also compared audiovisual integration in either naturalistic pairings (a facial expression paired with an emotional voice) or semantic pairings (an emotional picture paired with the same voice). We studied the hypothesis that semantic pairings, unlike naturalistic pairings, might require mediation by intact visual cortex and possibly by feedback to primary cortex from higher cognitive processes. Our results indicate that presenting incongruent visual affective information together with the voice translates as an amplitude decrease of auditory-event-related potentials. This effect obtains for both naturalistic and semantic pairings in the intact field, but is restricted to the naturalistic pairings in the blind field.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear recognition in the voice is modulated by unconsciously recognized facial expressions but not by unconsciously recognized affective pictures

Gelder

Pourtois

Weiskrantz

2002

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

Self Cite

108

102

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“…(Bowers et al, 1985, de Gelder et al, 2000 and, more recently, neuroimaging (e.g., (Kanwisher et al, 1997, Ishai et al, 1999 findings suggest that selective brain regions within the occipito-temporal cortex make distinct contributions to the complex process of face perception. The superior temporal sulcus (STS), a region located in the lateral occipitotemporal cortex, is suggested to process dynamic facial properties (Puce et al, 1998, Hoffman and: that is, structural elements that can change from moment to moment, such as the direction of gaze and emotional expressions, both of which play important roles in social interactions (Allison et al, 2000).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The contribution of the fusiform gyrus and superior temporal sulcus in processing facial attractiveness: Neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence

et al. 2008

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Current cognitive models suggest that the processing of dynamic facial attributes, including social signals such as gaze direction and facial expression, involves the superior temporal sulcus, whereas the processing of invariant facial structure such as the individuals' identity involves the fusiform face area. Where facial attractiveness, a social signal that may emerge from invariant facial structure, is processed within this dual-route model of face perception is uncertain. Here, we present two studies. First, we investigated the explicit judgments of facial attractiveness and attractiveness-motivated behaviour in patients with acquired prosopagnosia, a deficit in familiar face recognition usually associated with damage to medial occipitotemporal cortex. We found that both abilities were impaired in these patients, with some weak residual ability for attractiveness judgments found only in those patients with unilateral right occipitotemporal or bilateral anterior temporal lesions. Importantly, deficits in attractiveness perception correlated with the severity of the face recognition deficit. Second, we performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in healthy subjects that included an implicit and explicit processing of facial attractiveness. We found increased neural activity when explicitly judging facial attractiveness within a number of cortical regions including the fusiform face area, but not the superior temporal sulcus, indicating a potential contribution of the fusiform face area to this judgment. Thus, converging neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence points to a critical role of the inferior occipitotemporal cortex in the processing of facial attractiveness.

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“…We also presented neutral faces with minimally congruent neutral nonverbal vocal signals (i.e., polite coughs) to determine the extent to which integration mechanisms are engaged for facial-vocal pairings irrespective of congruence, because it has been suggested that facial and vocal integration is a mandatory process (10,17). To test whether a supra-additive response would be observed in the STS during AV presentation of emotion, we presented participants with unimodal faces (V condition) and nonverbal vocal expressions (A condition).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

MEG demonstrates a supra-additive response to facial and vocal emotion in the right superior temporal sulcus

Hagan

Woods²,

Johnson³

et al. 2009

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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An influential neural model of face perception suggests that the posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) is sensitive to those aspects of faces that produce transient visual changes, including facial expression. Other researchers note that recognition of expression involves multiple sensory modalities and suggest that the STS also may respond to crossmodal facial signals that change transiently. Indeed, many studies of audiovisual (AV) speech perception show STS involvement in AV speech integration. Here we examine whether these findings extend to AV emotion. We used magnetoencephalography to measure the neural responses of participants as they viewed and heard emotionally congruent fear and minimally congruent neutral face and voice stimuli. We demonstrate significant supra-additive responses (i.e., where AV > [unimodal auditory ؉ unimodal visual]) in the posterior STS within the first 250 ms for emotionally congruent AV stimuli. These findings show a role for the STS in processing crossmodal emotive signals.audio-visual emotion ͉ emotional faces ͉ emotional voices ͉ fear ͉ gamma S ome aspects of faces, such as identity, are relatively fixed whereas other aspects, such as facial expression, can change from moment to moment. A highly influential neural model of face perception suggests that the aspects of faces that change visibly (e.g., eye gaze, lip movement, facial expression) are processed by a neural pathway leading to the posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) (1, 2). However, both lip movement and facial expression are generally accompanied by changing auditory signals. Indeed, in daily life emotion commonly is conveyed through multiple signals involving the face, voice, and body. Although originating from different sensory modalities, these transient emotive signals are perceived and integrated within our social interactions with seemingly minimal effort. It therefore is possible that recognition of emotional expression is an intrinsically crossmodal process and that the sensitivity of the posterior STS to the changeable aspects of faces may extend to voices, as the posterior STS could serve to integrate emotional signals arising from faces and voices (3). During emotion perception, the role of the posterior STS may extend beyond the visual function of perceiving facial emotion to serve a wider purpose related to the crossmodal integration of facial and vocal signals.The STS is a prime candidate for the integration of visual and auditory emotive signals. The STS lies between primary auditory and visual cortices, and studies of audiovisual (AV) speech integration have demonstrated supra-additive responses in the STS to congruent speech stimuli (4, 5). Supra-additivity is a stringent criterion for multisensory integrative regions and is based on the known electrophysiological behavior of signal integration (6, 7). Supra-additivity occurs when the observed multisensory effect exceeds the sum of the unisensory components, i.e., when AV Ͼ [unimodal auditory (A) ϩ unimodal visual (V)]. The purpose of the pr...

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Covert Processing of Faces in Prosopagnosia Is Restricted to Facial Expressions: Evidence from Cross-Modal Bias

Cited by 34 publications

References 27 publications

Fear recognition in the voice is modulated by unconsciously recognized facial expressions but not by unconsciously recognized affective pictures

Fear recognition in the voice is modulated by unconsciously recognized facial expressions but not by unconsciously recognized affective pictures

The contribution of the fusiform gyrus and superior temporal sulcus in processing facial attractiveness: Neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence

MEG demonstrates a supra-additive response to facial and vocal emotion in the right superior temporal sulcus

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