Attentional Processes in Face Perception

描述(申请人提供)：在正常人群中，面部识别问题的流行率似乎被低估了。面孔失认症或“面部失明”(无论是先天的还是后天的)会造成数不清的尴尬，并经常导致社会孤立。最近对正常人的成像研究表明，当面孔出现时，人类皮质梭形回内的一个区域是活跃的，而非侵入性电生理研究现在已经证明，这种激活开始于面孔出现后约140ms的后部皮质(头皮ERP的N170成分)。对于正常的直立面孔，N170的幅度通常在右半球大于左半球，并被认为反映了面孔的结构加工。有一些证据表明，对面孔的反应可以通过注意力来调节。对结构性质的关注在右侧梭形脑区产生更多的调制，而对部分的关注在左侧产生更多的调制，这让人想起其他全局/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，包括知觉和自动性的作用(即检验我们关于面孔强制性优先的假设)，一些研究涉及面孔进入意识的加工水平(即测试我们的假设，即在其他条件相同的情况下，注意力被条件性地吸引到面孔)，以及其他研究在分裂和集中的条件下执行或自上而下机制在加工面孔中的作用。这些问题是通过结合神经心理学、认知和电生理学方法来检查正常参与者、患有先天性失认症的个体和患有影响意识的注意缺陷(即半注意力不集中)的患者的面部加工来解决的。这项建议有几个独特的优势：1)PI和Co-PI之间的合作，他们各自在认知神经注意心理学和面孔知觉电生理学方面的专业知识；2)相对较大的先天性遗忘症受试者(以色列2人，加利福尼亚州6人)，其中一些人已经在我们的两个实验室接受了相同的范例测试；3)为将在拟议项目中工作的研究生和博士后学生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.