Perceptual interference supports a non-modular account of face processing
Perceptual interference supports a non-modular account of face processing
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DOI：
10.1038/nn1029
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发表时间：
2003-04-01
影响因子：
25
通讯作者：
Collins, D
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Gauthier, I;Curran, T;Collins, D
对面部和非面部物体的感知具有共同的早期视觉处理阶段。然而，一些人认为，大脑最终会在专门用于面部感知的特定领域模块中将面部与其他物体分开处理。或者，这种对面孔的明显专业化可能是由于人们对此类刺激的专业知识所致。在这里，我们使用行为和电生理学干扰测量来解决面部和物体处理的功能独立性。如果人脸和汽车的专家处理依赖于与整体感知（所有部分的强制处理）相关的共同机制，那么对于被假定为人脸专家的人类受试者，汽车感知应该干扰并发的人脸感知。此外，随着汽车识别专业知识的增加，这种干扰应该会增加，事实上这就是我们所发现的。事件相关电位（ERP）表明，这种干扰源自有助于专业知识对象和面孔的整体处理的感知过程。
The perception of faces and of nonface objects share common early visual processing stages. Some argue, however, that the brain eventually processes faces separately from other objects, within a domain-specific module dedicated to face perception. This apparent specialization for faces could, alternatively, result from people's expertise with this category of stimuli. Here we used behavioral and electrophysiological measures of interference to address the functional independence of face and object processing. If the expert processing of faces and cars depend on common mechanisms related to holistic perception (obligatory processing of all parts), then for human subjects who are presumed to be face experts, car perception should interfere with concurrent face perception. Furthermore, such interference should increase with greater expertise in car identification, and indeed this is what we found. Event-related potentials (ERPs) suggest that this interference arose from perceptual processes contributing to the holistic processing of both objects of expertise and faces.