Idiosyncratic, retinotopic bias in face identification modulated by familiarity

Castello, Matteo Visconti di Oleggio; Taylor, Morgan; Cavanagh, Patrick; Gobbini, M. Ida

doi:10.1101/253468

Cited by 3 publications

References 84 publications

(145 reference statements)

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Familiarity revealed by involuntary eye movements on the fringe of awareness

Rosenzweig

Bonneh

2019

Sci Rep

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Involuntary eye movements during fixation of gaze are typically transiently inhibited following stimulus onset. This oculomotor inhibition (OMI), which includes microsaccades and spontaneous eye blinks, is modulated by stimulus saliency and anticipation, but it is currently unknown whether it is sensitive to familiarity. To investigate this, we measured the OMI while observers passively viewed a slideshow of one familiar and 7 unfamiliar facial images presented briefly at 1 Hz in random order. Since the initial experiments indicated that OMI was occasionally insensitive to familiarity when the facial images were highly visible, and to prevent top-down strategies and potential biases, we limited visibility by backward masking making the faces barely visible or at the fringe of awareness. Under these conditions, we found prolonged inhibition of both microsaccades and eye-blinks, as well as earlier onset of microsaccade inhibition with familiarity. These findings demonstrate, for the first time, the sensitivity of OMI to familiarity. Because this is based on involuntary eye movements and can be measured on the fringe of awareness and in passive viewing, our results provide direct evidence that OMI can be used as a novel physiological measure for studying hidden memories with potential implications for health, legal, and security purposes.

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Familiarity revealed by involuntary eye movements on the fringe of awareness

Rosenzweig

Bonneh

2019

Sci Rep

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Familiarity facilitates detection of angry expressions

Chauhan

Castello

Taylor

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Personal familiarity facilitates rapid and optimized detection of faces. In this study, we investigated whether familiarity associated with faces can also facilitate the detection of facial expressions. Models of face processing propose that face identity and face expression detection are mediated by distinct pathways. We used a visual search paradigm to assess if facial expressions of emotion (anger and happiness) were detected more rapidly when produced by familiar as compared to unfamiliar faces. We found that participants detected an angry expression 11% more accurately and 135 ms faster when produced by familiar as compared to unfamiliar faces while happy expressions were detected with equivalent accuracies and at equivalent speeds for familiar and unfamiliar faces. These results suggest that detectors in the visual system dedicated to processing features of angry expressions are optimized for familiar faces.

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Size Perception Biases Are Temporally Stable and Vary Consistently Between Visual Field Meridians

Schwarzkopf

2019

i-Perception

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The apparent size of visual stimuli depends on where in the visual field they appear. We recently presented a model of how size perception could be biased by stimulus encoding in retinotopic cortex. However, it remains unclear if such perceptual biases are instead trivially related to discrimination ability and if they are temporally stable. An independent test of the model is also still outstanding. Here, I show that perceptual biases are stable across stimulus durations between 50 and 1,000 milliseconds, even though discrimination ability unsurprisingly improves with duration. Furthermore, perceptual biases are stronger along the vertical than the horizontal meridian, which mirrors reported differences in spatial vision and the positional selectivity of early visual cortex. Taken together, these findings support our model of how size is inferred from cortical responses.

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Idiosyncratic, retinotopic bias in face identification modulated by familiarity

Cited by 3 publications

References 84 publications

Familiarity revealed by involuntary eye movements on the fringe of awareness

Familiarity revealed by involuntary eye movements on the fringe of awareness

Familiarity facilitates detection of angry expressions

Size Perception Biases Are Temporally Stable and Vary Consistently Between Visual Field Meridians

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