Evidence for a general neural signature of face familiarity

Abstract

We explored the neural signatures of face familiarity using cross-participant and cross-experiment decoding of event-related potentials, evoked by unknown and experimentally familiarized faces from a set of experiments with different participants, stimuli, and familiarization-types. Participants were either familiarized perceptually, via media exposure, or by personal interaction. We observed significant cross-experiment familiarity decoding involving all three experiments, predominantly over posterior and central regions of the right hemisphere in the 270 - 630 ms time window. This shared face familiarity effect was most prominent between the Media and Personal, as well as between the Perceptual and Personal experiments. Cross-experiment decodability makes this signal a strong candidate for a general neural indicator of face familiarity, independent of familiarization methods and stimuli. Furthermore, the sustained pattern of temporal generalization suggests that it reflects a single automatic processing cascade that is maintained over time.

Individual differences and the multidimensional nature of face perception

“…Research on individual differences has overwhelmingly examined recognition of unfamiliar faces, yet the faces of familiar people comprise much of personal daily experience. Group-level evidence shows that familiarity is directly related to recognition success, viewers are much better at recognizing familiar than unfamiliar faces 8,143-145 and higher levels of familiarity exert more powerful modulating effects on neural responses 64,[146][147][148][149][150] . If differences between familiar face representations are important for performance within an individual, these differences could also be important between individuals.…”

Detecting a viewer’s familiarity with a face: Evidence from event‐related brain potentials and classifier analyses

“…A further recent study reports reliable familiarity effects in all tested participants, which is similar to the present Experiment 1, but does not report a false alarm rate. Given the relatively small sample size in all experiments, including those we present here, there remains substantial uncertainty about the precision of these estimates (Cumming, 2012). However, on the basis of the available data it seems fair to conclude that the sensitivity of FPVS to detect familiarity responses in individual participants is at best similar but probably lower relative to the SFE.…”

“…Statistical analyses of ERP data were carried out using Analyses of Variance (ANOVA), with the within-subjects factors hemisphere (left, right), site (TP, P), familiarity (familiar, unfamiliar), and variability (high variability, single image), as well as t-tests for planned comparisons. Following an estimation approach in data analysis (Cumming, 2012), we report measures of effect size with appropriately sized confidence intervals (CIs) throughout. CIs for partial eta squared were calculated using scripts provided by M.J. Smithson (www.…”

“…Cohen's d for repeated-measures t-tests was bias-corrected and calculated using the mean standard deviation rather than the standard deviation of the difference as the denominator (d unb .) using ESCI (Cumming, 2012).…”

“…Familiar face recognition is often held to be largely automatic (Bruce & Young, 2012; for very recent neural evidence, see Dalski et al, 2021;Yan et al, 2017;. While there are numerous definitions of the term, most agree that automatic processes (i) are fast, and do not depend on (ii) conscious awareness, (iii) attentional resources, or (iv) intention or voluntary control (Logan, 1988;Moors, 2016;Posner & Snyder, 1975;Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977).…”