Face Perception: Effects of stimulus, context, and experience

视觉系统的主要目标之一是识别物体，以便我们可以适当地与它们互动，而人脸是我们与之互动的最重要的物体之一。尽管面部感知看起来毫不费力，但这个过程是如此复杂，以至于我们无法完全理解大脑是如何感知人脸的身份或性别等方面的。目前的建议旨在促进这种理解，特别是在刺激、环境和经验的相对作用方面。拟议的工作将结合行为技术和脑成像技术，如脑电图（EEG）。我们还采用了神经科学的“大数据”方法来评估面部处理背后的行为和神经过程，不仅在受控的实验室环境下相对较小的参与者群体中测量，而且在大规模测试和现实世界环境中收集的更大的参与者群体中也测量。

One of the main goals of the visual system is to recognize objects so that we may interact with them appropriately, and faces are one of the most important classes of objects with which we interact. Although face perception appears effortless, the process is so complex that we do not have a complete understanding of how our brain perceives aspects such as the identity or gender of individual faces. The current proposal aims to advance that understanding, particularly with respect to the relative roles of stimulus, context, and experience. The proposed work will combine behavioural techniques with brain imaging techniques, such as electroencephalography (EEG). We also adopt a “big-data” approach to neuroscience, to assess the behavioural and neural processes underlying face processing measured not only in relatively small groups of participants under controlled laboratory settings, but also in significantly larger groups of participants collected in both mass testing and real-world settings - in "the wild." The proposed program of research will focus on understanding how we process and identify faces, particularly how aspects of the stimulus, context, and experience influence our perception of faces. Recently, researchers, including my own lab, have focused on the relative importance of information carried in different orientation channels, and found that information carried by horizontal face structure is linked to face identification. My research group contributed significantly to advancing that work, finding that an individual's selectivity for horizontal structure predicts the face inversion effect (the fact the upside down faces are harder to recognise than upright faces), that horizontal structure is linked to the superior recognition of familiar and learned faces, and that, in addition to influencing behaviour, horizontal information affects early face-related brain markers. The current proposed studies address a number of unanswered questions, including moving beyond face identity to assess other key aspects of face processing, and how different aspects of face processing interact with each other and with the context in which we view faces. Specifically, we ask how the ways in which stimuli are presented impact the perception and neural processing of faces. We explore the similarities and differences between processing faces in different contexts, such as judging identity vs. gender. We aim to develop an approach to help individuals become better at recognizing faces, making use of what we have learned about face perception to date to create unique training programs. We also will increase our understanding of how individual differences among people influence face perception: how does face perception depend on gender and race? and do the same neural mechanisms explain face perception for individuals across the entire spectrum of face identification abilities - from the very poorest face recognisers to the very best?