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Component processes of human face perception in typical and atypical individuals

典型和非典型个体的人脸感知的组成过程

基本信息

批准号：
ES/K002457/1
负责人：
Martin Eimer
金额：
$ 48.34万
依托单位：
Birkbeck, University of London
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2013
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2013 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FK002457%2F1
关键词：
Component processes human face perception

项目摘要

Face perception is an essential component of human social interaction. It guides how we interact with others by enabling us to recognize individuals, identify their emotional state, and judge their attractiveness and trustworthiness. Because face perception operates so effortlessly and reliably, we rarely give it a second thought. But in fact, face perception and recognition are difficult achievements that are based on complex and poorly understood mechanisms. The real difficulty of face processing only becomes apparent when meeting people without any general perceptual or intellectual impairment, and without any history of neurological damage, who find it extremely hard to recognize family and friends from their faces. Behavioural tests of various aspects of face processing conducted by us and by other groups have shown that many of these people with developmental prosopagnosia (DP) have no comparable problems with object recognition, which indicates that faces and non-face objects are processed by different mechanisms. All DPs show severe deficits in the processing of identity, but other aspects of face processing, such as the perception of face parts and face configurations or the processing of emotional facial expression, can be intact or impaired, suggesting that DP is a heterogeneous condition. In our current ESRC-funded research project, we use a combination of behavioural and electrophysiological measures (event-related brain potentials, ERPs) to gain new insights into which aspects of face processing are damaged in DP. Our results so far point to early visual-perceptual stages of face processing as a major cause of the face recognition problems that affect individuals with DP. For example, people with intact face perception process upright faces and inverted faces very differently, which is interpreted as evidence that the perception of upright faces is "configural" or "holistic", whereas inverted faces are processed in a qualitatively different "part-based" fashion. We have found that people with DP do not show these typical processing differences between upright and inverted faces, indicating that their ability to process upright faces in a configural/holistic fashion did not develop properly. To find out more precisely how face perception differs between DPs and people with intact face processing, we will conduct a series of experiments with face and non-face stimuli that are specifically designed to engage different aspects of face processing (e.g., the perception of salient face parts such as the eyes, the processing of facial configurations, perceiving faces from different viewpoints, using face perception to remember individual faces), to find out which processes operate normally and which are impaired in people with DP. We will also study whether DPs and non-impaired people look at faces differently, and whether they use different parts of a face when trying to identify it. Finding out which aspects of face perception work well and which are impaired in DPs will have important implications for our understanding the mechanisms that underlie face perception in people with intact face processing abilities. It will also greatly expand our knowledge of why some people have severe deficits in face recognition. Such deficits can have an enormous impact on their social lives. Many have difficulty maintaining friendships due to perceived snubs and their recognition difficulties at work can be extremely troubling.

面部感知是人类社会互动的重要组成部分。它使我们能够识别个人、确定他们的情绪状态并判断他们的吸引力和可信度，从而指导我们如何与他人互动。由于面部感知的运作如此轻松且可靠，因此我们很少再考虑它。但事实上，人脸感知和识别是基于复杂且知之甚少的机制的困难成就。只有当遇到没有任何一般知觉或智力障碍、没有任何神经系统损伤史的人时，面部处理的真正困难才会变得明显，他们发现很难从脸上认出家人和朋友。我们和其他小组对面部处理的各个方面进行的行为测试表明，许多患有发育性面容失认症（DP）的人在物体识别方面没有类似的问题，这表明面部和非面部物体是通过不同的机制处理的。所有 DP 都在身份处理方面表现出严重缺陷，但面部处理的其他方面，例如面部部位和面部配置的感知或情感面部表情的处理，可能完整或受损，这表明 DP 是一种异质性疾病。在我们目前由 ESRC 资助的研究项目中，我们结合使用行为和电生理测量（事件相关脑电位，ERP）来获得关于 DP 中面部处理的哪些方面受损的新见解。迄今为止，我们的结果表明，面部处理的早期视觉感知阶段是影响 DP 个体的面部识别问题的主要原因。例如，具有完整面部感知的人对直立面部和倒立面部的处理方式非常不同，这被解释为直立面部感知是“结构性”或“整体性”的证据，而倒立面部则以一种性质不同的“基于部分”的方式处理。我们发现，患有 DP 的人在直立面和倒立面之间没有表现出这些典型的处理差异，这表明他们以配置/整体方式处理直立面的能力没有得到适当的发展。为了更准确地找出 DP 和具有完整面部处理能力的人之间的面部感知有何不同，我们将进行一系列针对面部和非面部刺激的实验，这些实验专门设计用于参与面部处理的不同方面（例如，对眼睛等显着面部部分的感知、面部配置的处理、从不同角度感知面部、使用面部感知来记住单个面部），以找出哪些过程 DP 患者的功能正常，但功能受损。我们还将研究 DP 和正常人看待面部的方式是否不同，以及他们在尝试识别面部时是否使用面部的不同部分。找出面部感知的哪些方面在 DP 中发挥作用以及哪些方面受到损害，对于我们理解具有完整面部处理能力的人面部感知的机制具有重要意义。它还将极大地扩展我们对为什么有些人在面部识别方面存在严重缺陷的认识。这种缺陷会对他们的社会生活产生巨大影响。许多人由于被认为受到冷落而难以维持友谊，而且他们在工作中难以得到认可可能会非常令人不安。