The cognitive neuroscience of person identification

Biederman, Irving; Shilowich, Bryan E.; Herald, Sarah B.; Margalit, Eshed; Maarek, Rafael; Meschke, Emily; Hacker, Catrina

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2018.01.036

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Such deficits can be strikingly selective; in prosopagnosia, the severe face recognition deficit is not accompanied by a correspondingly severe problem in recognising familiar voices, and in phonagnosia the severe voice recognition deficit is not accompanied by a correspondingly severe problem in recognising familiar faces. These patterns strongly suggest a degree of modality-specificity in face and voice recognition mechanisms [3,45,47,48]. Consistent with these observations, neuropsychological and functional brain imaging studies implicate substantially different underlying brain regions for initial stages of face and voice recognition [3,24,[49][50][51].…”

Section: Evidence Of Modality-specific Face and Voice Recognitionsupporting

confidence: 56%

“…Whilst person identity can be determined from facial, vocal or body cues [9,[45][46][47], it is clear that there exist parallel forms of neuropsychological deficits of face and voice recognition following brain injury [48]. In some cases these involve severely impaired recognition of the identities of familiar faces (prosopagnosia) or severely impaired recognition of familiar voices (phonagnosia).…”

Section: Evidence Of Modality-specific Face and Voice Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent work shows that these differences in the sound of the same voice work in much the same way as differences in the appearance of the same face to drive a corresponding form of organisation that can achieve recognition of familiar individuals across widely differing examples of the same voice [60,61,68]. For this reason, recognition of familiar faces or familiar voices by most neurologically normal individuals far outstrips recognition of unfamiliar faces and voices [39,40,60], and impairments in recognition of familiar faces or voices can occur even in the context of relatively preserved recognition or matching of their unfamiliar counterparts [24,45,47]. In effect, a person can learn about the idiosyncratic variability of each familiar face and each familiar voice in order to recognise them.…”

Section: Functional Demands Of Face and Voice Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Face and Voice Perception: Understanding Commonalities and Differences

Young

Frühholz

Schweinberger

2020

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

130

140

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Faces and voices are of high importance in interpersonal communication, and there are notable parallels between face and voice perception. However, these parallels do not sit entirely comfortably with the full range of available evidence. This review evaluates parallels between the functional and neural organisation of face and voice perception, whilst locating these in the context of ways in which faces and voices also differ. It takes the discussion to the next level by asking why these commonalities and differences exist. A novel synthesis is offered, grounded in the interaction between intrinsic characteristics of faces and voices and the demands of everyday life, showing how the pattern of findings reflects a system that can respond optimally to different everyday demands. Highlights• Similarities in functional organisation have led to the proposal of parallel, largely independent processing streams for voices and faces.Linked to this conception is the idea that the voice can be considered to be a kind of 'auditory face'.• However, neuroimaging studies show a strong contribution of multimodal regions that respond both to voices and to faces. Closer examination of neuropsychological and behavioural studies supports this form of organisation.• The contributions of differences between how relatively invariant information (such as a person's identity) and more rapidly changing information (such as their emotional state) must be represented need to be carefully considered.• Understanding the everyday demands of different tasks involving voice and face perception offers a resolution in which these serve as strong drivers of the optimal functional and neural organisation. Young, Frühholz and Schweinberger (cont'd) 3 Understanding face and voice perception Human communication involves complex patterns of signals originating primarily from the face, voice, and body [1]. Whilst much of this communication takes the form of propositional speech, faces and voices can also convey common forms of information concerning a person's gender, age, identity, health and emotional state, and they create impressions of warmth, competence and other social traits [2,3]. Much modern research has therefore focussed on communication from the face and voice [4-9]. This review aims to strengthen theoretical approaches to key properties of face and voice perception. It offers a synthesis of existing evidence based on evaluating functional perspectives (see Glossary) and neural perspectives in light of the overarching background of what can be communicated through faces and voices, the different contingencies thiscreates, the demands of everyday life, and the ways in which these act as determinants of a communicative system that has to balance the needs of the sender and recipient.

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Section: Evidence Of Modality-specific Face and Voice Recognitionsupporting

confidence: 56%

Section: Evidence Of Modality-specific Face and Voice Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Functional Demands Of Face and Voice Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Face and Voice Perception: Understanding Commonalities and Differences

Young

Frühholz

Schweinberger

2020

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

130

140

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“…Our results support the claim that face and voice recognition ability are distinct from each other, rather than facets of a broader person recognition ability 82 . At first, this view seems hard to reconcile with the results of a recent study that found that individuals with exceptionally good face recognition ability-so called superrecognisers 83 -performed better than a group of typical controls on a famous voice identification task 84 .…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Normal recognition of famous voices in developmental prosopagnosia

Tsantani

Cook

2020

Sci Rep

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Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a condition characterised by lifelong face recognition difficulties. Recent neuroimaging findings suggest that DP may be associated with aberrant structure and function in multimodal regions of cortex implicated in the processing of both facial and vocal identity. These findings suggest that both facial and vocal recognition may be impaired in DP. To test this possibility, we compared the performance of 22 DPs and a group of typical controls, on closely matched tasks that assessed famous face and famous voice recognition ability. As expected, the DPs showed severe impairment on the face recognition task, relative to typical controls. In contrast, however, the DPs and controls identified a similar number of voices. Despite evidence of interactions between facial and vocal processing, these findings suggest some degree of dissociation between the two processing pathways, whereby one can be impaired while the other develops typically. A possible explanation for this dissociation in DP could be that the deficit originates in the early perceptual encoding of face structure, rather than at later, post-perceptual stages of face identity processing, which may be more likely to involve interactions with other modalities.

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“…The human brain is able to process a great number of characteristics belonging to a familiar face in a matter of milliseconds and without apparent cognitive cost [ 4 ]. This type of processing seems to be inherent to the human being and fundamental for multiple areas; among them, one of the most crucial ones would be socialization [ 5 , 6 , 7 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Profiles on the Orientation Discrimination Processing of Human Faces

Moret-Tatay

Baixauli-Fortea

Grau-Sevilla

2020

IJERPH

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Face recognition is a crucial subject for public health, as socialization is one of the main characteristics for full citizenship. However, good recognizers would be distinguished, not only by the number of faces they discriminate but also by the number of rejected stimuli as unfamiliar. When it comes to face recognition, it is important to remember that position, to some extent, would not entail a high cognitive cost, unlike other processes in similar areas of the brain. The aim of this paper was to examine participant’s recognition profiles according to face position. For this reason, a recognition task was carried out by employing the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces. Reaction times and accuracy were employed as dependent variables and a cluster analysis was carried out. A total of two profiles were identified in participants’ performance, which differ in position in terms of reaction times but not accuracy. The results can be described as follows: first, it is possible to identify performance profiles in visual recognition of faces that differ in position in terms of reaction times, not accuracy; secondly, results suggest a bias towards the left. At the applied level, this could be of interest with a view to conducting training programs in face recognition.

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The cognitive neuroscience of person identification

Cited by 9 publications

References 30 publications

Face and Voice Perception: Understanding Commonalities and Differences

Face and Voice Perception: Understanding Commonalities and Differences

Normal recognition of famous voices in developmental prosopagnosia

Profiles on the Orientation Discrimination Processing of Human Faces

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