Real-Time Measurement of Face Recognition in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation

Abstract

Event-related potentials (ERPs) have been used extensively to study the processes involved in recognition memory. In particular, the early familiarity component of recognition has been linked to the FN400 (mid-frontal negative deflection between 300 and 500 ms), whereas the recollection component has been linked to a later positive deflection over the parietal cortex (500–800 ms). In this study, we measured the ERPs elicited by faces with varying degrees of familiarity. Participants viewed a continuous sequence of faces with either low (novel faces), medium (celebrity faces), or high (faces of friends and family) familiarity while performing a separate face-identification task. We found that the level of familiarity was significantly correlated with the magnitude of both the early and late recognition components. Additionally, by using a single-trial classification technique, applied to the entire evoked response, we were able to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar faces with a high degree of accuracy. The classification of high versus low familiarly resulted in areas under the curve of up to 0.99 for some participants. Interestingly, our classifier model (a linear discriminant function) was developed using a completely separate object categorization task on a different population of participants.

Brain responses to handwritten and printed letters differentially depend on the activation state of the primary motor cortex

“…In addition, in visual recognition tasks, components of the evoked potentials at around 500-600 ms are also known to be responsible for recollection (for review Friedman and Johnson, 2000), their amplitude being related to the amount of knowledge of the observed stimulus (Smith, 1993;Touryan et al, 2011). It is therefore possible that the information coded by the primary motor cortex participates in the recollection process, probably because the knowledge related to the movement is necessary to produce the letter is critical.…”

Faces, locations, and tools: a proposed two-stimulus P300 brain computer interface

“…In 2013, Kaufmann et al compared familiar personally-known faces to familiar famous faces based on the findings of Touryan, Gibson, Horne, and Weber (2011), who found that familiar family faces to elicit larger N400 responses than familiar famous faces. In the nondisabled sample, it was found that performance was significantly different between the classic character flash condition (CF) and the face conditions (FF) but there was no significant difference between the two FF conditions.…”

Toward shift invariant detection of event-related potentials in non-invasive brain-computer interface

“…In this paradigm, each image replaces the previous one at the same spatial location. Single-trial detection of ERPs has been addressed in several problems such as target detection by using RSVP tasks, e.g., the search of targets in satellite images (Bigdely-Shamlo et al, 2008;Gerson et al, 2006;Parra et al, 2008), face recognition (Touryan et al, 2011). Target detection has also been the subject of a recent competition in an international machine learning workshop (MLSP) (Hild et al, 2010).…”