Causal evidence of the involvement of the right occipital face area in face-identity acquisition
Causal evidence of the involvement of the right occipital face area in face-identity acquisition
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DOI：
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.01.043
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发表时间：
2017-03-01
期刊：
影响因子：
5.7
通讯作者：
Kovacs, Gyula
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Ambrus, Geza Gergely;Windel, Fabienne;Kovacs, Gyula
越来越多的证据表明，枕骨面部区域（OFA），最初被认为是参与构建一个低层次的表征的物理特征的脸，也参与了更高层次的脸处理。为了测试OFA是否与新面孔身份的学习有因果关系，我们使用了经颅磁刺激（TMS）和顺序排序面孔匹配范例（Andrews et al. 2015）。首先，参与者在最初的学习阶段对两个陌生人的图像进行分类，同时使用TMS刺激他们的右OFA或顶点。在随后的测试阶段，我们测量了参与者对先前训练的身份的新图像和两个新身份的面部匹配性能。我们发现，与顶点控制组中的新身份相比，受过训练的面孔匹配性能准确性更高，这表明排序任务导致了对所涉及身份的附带学习。然而，在rOFA刺激组中，在训练的和新的身份之间没有观察到这种差异。我们的研究结果支持这一假设，rOFA的作用不仅限于低级别的物理特征的处理，但它有一个显着的因果关系的作用，在面对身份编码和身份特异性记忆痕迹的形成。
There is growing evidence that the occipital face area (OFA), originally thought to be involved in the construction of a low-level representation of the physical features of a face, is also taking part in higher-level face processing. To test whether the OFA is causally involved in the learning of novel face identities, we have used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) together with a sequential sorting face matching paradigm (Andrews et al. 2015). First, participants sorted images of two unknown persons during the initial learning phase while either their right OFA or the Vertex was stimulated using TMS. In the subsequent test phase, we measured the participants' face matching performance for novel images of the previously trained identities and for two novel identities. We found that face-matching performance accuracy was higher for the trained as compared to the novel identities in the vertex control group, suggesting that the sorting task led to incidental learning of the identities involved. However, no such difference was observed between trained and novel identities in the rOFA stimulation group. Our results support the hypothesis that the role of the rOFA is not limited to the processing of low-level physical features, but it has a significant causal role in face identity encoding and in the formation of identity-specific memory-traces.