Collaborative Research: Eye movements and retinotopic face encoding in children, adults, and developmental prosopagnosia

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Face recognition is central for social interaction, and people with face recognition impairments suffer from difficulties that impact their personal and professional lives. Previous research has indicated that face recognition ability is strongly influenced by where on the face people look, and that this tends to be consistent for a given person. For example, some people always look between the eyes, while others look close to the tip of the nose or the mouth. It has also been shown that each person recognizes faces best when they look near the location they normally fixate. These habits suggest that each person's face processing and eye movement systems have been mutually shaped, or tuned, to optimize recognition ability. However, little is known about how these factors contribute to differences in face recognition ability, how they change in adults, and how they develop in children. This project will address these fundamental questions, and could prove important in treating patients with deficits in face recognition. The project will consist of three components: In the project’s first component, the investigators will examine where adults between the ages of 18 and 50 usually look on faces and where their “sweet spot” (optimal match between fixation and processing) lies. Preliminary results indicate that adults tend to look lower on faces as they age, indicating that the tuning of our face system changes even in adulthood. This study will examine whether this holds for a larger sample by comparing across ages and will explore the dynamics of gaze changes for individuals by measuring the same participants once and then again three years later. In the second component, the investigators will examine where people with developmental prosopagnosia (DP), a condition characterized by severe face recognition impairments, look on faces and whether they show a good match between where they look and their sweet spot. In the third component, the investigators will determine where children look on the face and how their tuning to faces changes as they age. It is expected that where children look will not change but that their face tuning will become sharper as they age. These possibilities will be tested by comparing children across different ages and through longitudinal testing of the same children.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.