Face Perception: Effects of stimulus, context, and experience

视觉系统的主要目标之一是识别对象，以便我们可以适当地与它们交互，而人脸是我们与之交互的最重要的对象类别之一。尽管面孔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我们的大脑是如何感知各个方面的，比如个人面孔的身份或性别。目前的建议旨在促进这种理解，特别是关于刺激、背景和经验的相对作用。这项拟议的工作将把行为技术与脑成像技术结合起来，如脑电(EEG)。我们还采用了神经科学的“大数据”方法，来评估面部处理的行为和神经过程，不仅在受控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大得多的参与者群体中--在“野外”--测量。 拟议的研究计划将侧重于了解我们是如何处理和识别面孔的，特别是刺激、背景和体验如何影响我们对面孔的感知。最近，包括我自己的实验室在内的研究人员关注了不同取向渠道携带的信息的相对重要性，发现水平面孔结构携带的信息与人脸识别有关。我的研究小组为推动这项工作做出了重大贡献，他们发现，个人对水平结构的选择预示着面孔反转效应(倒立的面孔比直立的面孔更难识别)，水平结构与对熟悉的和学习过的面孔的出色识别有关，而且，除了影响行为外，水平信息还会影响与面孔相关的早期大脑标记。 目前拟议的研究解决了一些尚未回答的问题，包括超越面孔身份来评估面孔处理的其他关键方面，以及面孔处理的不同方面如何相互作用以及如何与我们观看面孔的背景相互作用。具体地说，我们问刺激呈现的方式如何影响面孔的感知和神经处理。我们探讨了不同情境下面孔加工的异同，如身份判断与性别判断。我们的目标是开发一种方法，帮助个人更好地识别人脸，利用我们迄今所学的关于人脸感知的知识来创建独特的培训计划。我们还将加深我们对人与人之间的个体差异如何影响面孔感知的理解：面孔感知如何取决于性别和种族？同样的神经机制是否解释了所有人脸识别能力的个体--从最差的人脸识别者到最优秀的人脸识别者--对人脸的感知？

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?