Subcortical human face processing? Evidence from masked priming.

Khalid, Shah; Finkbeiner, Matthias; König, Peter; Ansorge, Ulrich

doi:10.1037/a0030867

Cited by 22 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Finally, the authors examined the influence of face processing without awareness while our task examined overt face comparison, and these might involve different neural substrates. It is not so clear, therefore, that our findings are at odds with those of Khalid et al (2012), and further consideration for the apparent differences is warranted.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 69%

“…On the surface, this claim seems to be inconsistent with some existing findings. For example, Khalid, Finkbeiner, König, and Ansorge (2012) demonstrated that low-pass (but not high-pass) filtered face primes presented peripherally produce a congruency effect in a sex discrimination task; that is, performance was enhanced when the preceding prime and following probe were of the same gender compared with when they were not. This finding seems to suggest that information about the sex of a face may be subcortically represented, contrary to our findings.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Instead, our findings are consistent with the view, referred to as the “mid-brain hypothesis” that face perception can be mediated by subcortical structures. Although the midbrain hypothesis is specifically designated to refer to subliminal face perception (and is focused more on the analysis of emotional/motivational aspects of faces), the data from those studies support the engagement of the subcortical system in face perception (see Finkbeiner & Palermo, 2009; see also Khalid et al, 2012, for review of this hypothesis). Although we are not able to identify which particular substructure of the subcortical system is implicated here, the most likely candidates are the amygdala and superior colliculus based on existing evidence.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Monocular Advantage for Face Perception Implicates Subcortical Mechanisms in Adult Humans

Gabay

Nestor²,

Dundas³

et al. 2014

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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The ability to recognize faces accurately and rapidly is an evolutionarily adaptive process. Most studies examining the neural correlates of face perception in adult humans have focused on a distributed cortical network of face-selective regions. There is, however, robust evidence from phylogenetic and ontogenetic studies that implicates subcortical structures, and recently, some investigations in adult humans indicate subcortical correlates of face perception as well. The questions addressed here are whether low-level subcortical mechanisms for face perception (in the absence of changes in expression) are conserved in human adults, and if so, what is the nature of these subcortical representations. In a series of four experiments, we presented pairs of images to the same or different eyes. Participants’ performance demonstrated that subcortical mechanisms, indexed by monocular portions of the visual system, play a functional role in face perception. These mechanisms are sensitive to face-like configurations and afford a coarse representation of a face, comprised of primarily low spatial frequency information, which suffices for matching faces but not for more complex aspects of face perception such as sex differentiation. Importantly, these subcortical mechanisms are not implicated in the perception of other visual stimuli, such as cars or letter strings. These findings suggest a conservation of phylogenetically and ontogenetically lower-order systems in adult human face perception. The involvement of subcortical structures in face recognition provokes a reconsideration of current theories of face perception, which are reliant on cortical level processing, inasmuch as it bolsters the cross-species continuity of the biological system for face recognition.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 69%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Monocular Advantage for Face Perception Implicates Subcortical Mechanisms in Adult Humans

Gabay

Nestor²,

Dundas³

et al. 2014

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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“…These behavioral studies suggest that gender information is processed in the subcortical visual system that plays a major role in infants. Furthermore, a behavioral study has reported that the priming of masked (subliminal) spatially low-pass, but not high-pass, filtered facial images significantly affected the subsequent discrimination of gender (Khalid et al, 2013). Because subliminal low-pass filtered images are thought to be processed in the subcortical visual pathway (Tamietto and de Gelder, 2010), these findings suggest that the subcortical pathway can process gender information (Khalid et al, 2013).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These subcortical routes might also be involved in the rapid processing of facial expression information (Morris et al, 2001; Tamietto and de Gelder, 2010), and the facial detection of infants with immature cortical visual systems might depend on the subcortical visual system (Johnson, 2005). Furthermore, human neuropsychological studies have reported substantial evidence that suggests that this subcortical pathway is involved in the discrimination of face gender and facial identity (Morris et al, 2001; Khalid et al, 2013; Gabay et al, 2014). Consistently, recent neurophysiological studies have reported that neurons in the monkey SC and pulvinar respond differentially to various photos of human and monkey faces, human facial expressions, and face-like patterns (Maior et al, 2010; Van Le et al, 2013; Nguyen et al, 2013, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Population Coding of Facial Information in the Monkey Superior Colliculus and Pulvinar

et al. 2016

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The superior colliculus (SC) and pulvinar are thought to function as a subcortical visual pathway that bypasses the striate cortex and detects fundamental facial information. We previously investigated neuronal responses in the SC and pulvinar of monkeys during a delayed nonmatching-to-sample task, in which the monkeys were required to discriminate among 35 facial photos of five models and other categories of visual stimuli, and reported that population coding by multiple SC and pulvinar neurons well discriminated facial photos from other categories of stimuli (Nguyen et al., 2013, 2014). However, it remains unknown whether population coding could represent multiple types of facial information including facial identity, gender, facial orientation, and gaze direction. In the present study, to investigate population coding of multiple types of facial information by the SC and pulvinar neurons, we reanalyzed the same neuronal responses in the SC and pulvinar; the responses of 112 neurons in the SC and 68 neurons in the pulvinar in serial 50-ms epochs after stimulus onset were reanalyzed with multidimensional scaling (MDS). The results indicated that population coding by neurons in both the SC and pulvinar classified some aspects of facial information, such as face orientation, gender, and identity, of the facial photos in the second epoch (50–100 ms after stimulus onset). The Euclidean distances between all the pairs of stimuli in the MDS spaces in the SC were significantly correlated with those in the pulvinar, which suggested that the SC and pulvinar function as a unit. However, in contrast with the known population coding of face neurons in the temporal cortex, the facial information coding in the SC and pulvinar was coarse and insufficient. In these subcortical areas, identity discrimination was face orientation-dependent and the left and right profiles were not discriminated. Furthermore, gaze direction information was not extracted in the SC and pulvinar. These results suggest that the SC and pulvinar, which comprise the subcortical visual pathway, send coarse and rapid information on faces to the cortical system in a bottom-up process.

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The two-process theory of face processing: Modifications based on two decades of data from infants and adults

Johnson

Senju

Tomalski

2015

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

265

214

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Johnson and Morton (1991. Biology and Cognitive Development: The Case of Face Recognition. Blackwell, Oxford) used Gabriel Horn's work on the filial imprinting model to inspire a two-process theory of the development of face processing in humans. In this paper we review evidence accrued over the past two decades from infants and adults, and from other primates, that informs this two-process model. While work with newborns and infants has been broadly consistent with predictions from the model, further refinements and questions have been raised. With regard to adults, we discuss more recent evidence on the extension of the model to eye contact detection, and to subcortical face processing, reviewing functional imaging and patient studies. We conclude with discussion of outstanding caveats and future directions of research in this field.

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Subcortical human face processing? Evidence from masked priming.

Cited by 22 publications

References 60 publications

Monocular Advantage for Face Perception Implicates Subcortical Mechanisms in Adult Humans

Monocular Advantage for Face Perception Implicates Subcortical Mechanisms in Adult Humans

Population Coding of Facial Information in the Monkey Superior Colliculus and Pulvinar

The two-process theory of face processing: Modifications based on two decades of data from infants and adults

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