Perception and Processing of Faces in the Human Brain Is Tuned to Typical Feature Locations
Perception and Processing of Faces in the Human Brain Is Tuned to Typical Feature Locations
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DOI：
10.1523/jneurosci.4131-14.2016
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发表时间：
2016-09-07
影响因子：
5.3
通讯作者：
Rees, Geraint
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
de Haas, Benjamin;Schwarzkopf, D. Samuel;Rees, Geraint
面孔是显著的社会刺激，其特征吸引刻板模式的注视。这种凝视行为对感知和大脑活动的影响在很大程度上是未知的。在这里，我们表征和量化的retinotopic偏见所暗示的典型的凝视行为对脸，这导致眼睛和嘴出现最经常在上部和下部的视野，分别。我们发现，成年人的视觉系统对这些偶然事件进行了调整。在两个识别实验中，孤立的人脸部分的识别性能更好，当他们提出在典型的，而不是相反，视野位置。在同一样本中，位置颠倒的识别代价约为整张脸颠倒的60%。同样，功能磁共振成像实验表明，当这些特征出现在典型的视野位置而不是相反的视野位置时，右枕下回中由眼睛和嘴巴刺激诱发的活动模式可以以更高的准确性分离出来。我们的研究结果表明，thathumanface知觉不仅是由本地位置的功能在一个脸的背景下，但功能是否出现在典型的retinotopic位置给定正常的凝视行为。这样的位置灵敏度可以反映类别特定视觉处理对视网膜输入统计的微调。我们的研究结果进一步表明，视网膜的异质性可能发挥作用的脸反转效应和理解的条件影响凝视行为的面孔，如自闭症谱系障碍和先天性面容失认症。
Faces are salient social stimuli whose features attract a stereotypical pattern of fixations. The implications of this gaze behavior for perception and brain activity are largely unknown. Here, we characterize and quantify a retinotopic bias implied by typical gaze behavior toward faces, which leads to eyes and mouth appearing most often in the upper and lower visual field, respectively. We found that the adult human visual system is tuned to these contingencies. In two recognition experiments, recognition performance for isolated face parts was better when they were presented at typical, rather than reversed, visual field locations. The recognition cost of reversed locations was equal to similar to 60% of that for whole face inversion in the same sample. Similarly, an fMRI experiment showed that patterns of activity evoked by eye and mouth stimuli in the right inferior occipital gyrus could be separated with significantly higher accuracy when these features were presented at typical, rather than reversed, visual field locations. Our findings demonstrate thathumanface perception is determined not only by the local position of features within a face context, but by whether features appear at the typical retinotopic location given normal gaze behavior. Such location sensitivity may reflect fine-tuning of category-specific visual processing to retinal input statistics. Our findings further suggest that retinotopic heterogeneity might play a role for face inversion effects and for the understanding of conditions affecting gaze behavior toward faces, such as autism spectrum disorders and congenital prosopagnosia.