Attentional Processes in Face Perception

描述（由申请人提供）：在正常人群中，面部识别问题的普遍性似乎被低估了。面孔失认症或“脸盲症”（无论是先天性的还是后天的）会导致难以言表的尴尬，并经常导致社会孤立。最近对正常人的成像研究表明，当人脸出现时，人类皮层梭状回内的一个区域是活跃的，而非侵入性电生理学研究现在已经证明，这种激活在人脸出现后140毫秒左右开始（头皮ERP的N170成分）。对于正常的直立面部，N170的振幅通常在右半球大于左半球，并且被认为反映了面部的构形处理。有证据表明，对面孔的反应可以通过注意力来调节。对结构属性的关注会在右侧梭状回产生更多的调制，而对部分的关注会在左侧梭状回产生更多的调制，这让人想起其他半球整体/局部差异的证据。这里提出的研究涉及注意和面部感知，包括意识和自动性的作用（即，测试我们对面孔的强制性优先性的假设），一些研究解决了关于面孔进入意识的加工水平的问题（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），还有一些研究解决了在分裂和集中条件下处理面孔的执行或自上而下机制的作用。这些问题是通过结合神经心理学、认知和电生理学的方法来研究正常参与者、先天性面孔失认症患者和影响意识的注意力缺陷患者（即半注意力不集中）的面部处理。该提案有几个独特的优势：1)PI和Co-PI之间的合作，利用各自在注意力认知神经心理学和面部感知电生理学方面的专业知识；2)相对较大的先天性面孔失认症受试者队列（以色列2人，加州6人），其中一些人已经在我们的两个实验室用相同的范式进行了测试；3)为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.