Attentional Processes in Face Perception

描述（由申请人提供）：面部识别问题的患病率似乎在正常人群中被低估了。面容失认症或“脸盲”（无论是先天的还是后天的）会导致难以形容的尴尬，并往往导致社会孤立。最近在正常人中的成像研究表明，当面部存在时，人类皮层的梭状回内的区域是活跃的，并且非侵入性电生理学研究现在已经证明，这种激活在面部呈现后约140 ms开始（头皮ERP的N170分量）。对于正常直立面孔，N170的振幅通常在右半球大于左半球，并且已经被认为反映了面孔的视觉加工。有一些证据表明，对面孔的反应可以通过注意力来调节。注意到图形属性会在右侧梭状核产生更多的调制，而注意到部分会在左侧产生更多的调制，这让人想起了其他整体/局部半球差异的证据。这里提出的研究涉及注意力和面孔知觉，包括意识和自动性的作用（即，测试我们关于面部的强制优先级的假设），其中一些解决了关于面部进入意识的处理水平的问题（即，测试我们的假设，即所有其他条件相同，注意力被反射性地吸引到面孔上），以及其他解决执行或自上而下机制在分裂和集中条件下处理面孔中的作用的方法。这些问题通过结合神经心理学、认知和电生理学方法来解决，以检查正常参与者、患有先天性面容失认症的个体和患有影响意识的注意力缺陷的患者（即，半注意力不集中）。这项建议有几个独特的优势：1）PI和Co-PI之间的合作，他们各自在注意力的认知神经心理学和面部感知的电生理学方面的专业知识; 2）相对较大的先天性面容失认症受试者队列（2名在以色列，6名在加州），其中一些人已经在我们的两个实验室中使用相同的范式进行了测试; 3）为将从事拟议项目的研究生和博士后提供翻译培训的机会。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The prevalence of facial recognition problems appears to have been underestimated in the normal population. Prosopagnosia or "face blindness" (whether congenital or acquired) causes untold embarrassment and often leads to social isolation. Recent imaging studies in normals have suggested that an area within the fusiform gyrus of the human cortex is active when faces are present, and non-invasive electrophysiological studies have now demonstrated that this activation begins around 140 ms over posterior cortex after presentation of a face (N170 component of the scalp ERP). The amplitude of the N170 is usually larger over the right than left hemisphere for normal upright faces and has been argued to reflect configural processing of faces. There has been some evidence that the response to faces can be modulated by attention. Attention to the configural properties produces more modulation in the right fusiform while attention to parts produces more modulation in the left, reminiscent of the evidence for other global/local hemispheric differences. The studies proposed here concern attention and face perception, including the role of awareness and automaticity (i.e., testing our hypothesis for mandatory priority of faces), some which address questions concerning the level of processing at which faces enter awareness (i.e., testing our hypothesis that all else being equal, attention is drawn to faces reflexively), and others that address the role of executive or top down mechanisms in processing faces under divided and focused conditions. These issues are addressed by combining neuropsychological, cognitive and electrophysiological methods to examine face processing in normal participants, in individuals who suffer from congenital prosopagnosia and in patients with attentional deficits that affect awareness (i.e., hemi-inattention). There are several unique strengths to this proposal: 1) collaboration between the PI and Co-PI with their respective expertise in cognitive neuropsychology of attention and electrophysiology of face perception; 2) the relatively large cohort of congenital prosopagnosic subjects (2 in Israel & 6 in California), some who have already been tested with the same paradigms across our two laboratories; 3) the opportunity for translational training for graduate and post doctoral students who will work on the proposed projects.