Face Perception: Effects of stimulus, context, and experience

视觉系统的主要目标之一是识别物体，以便我们可以与它们进行适当的交互，而人脸是我们与之交互的最重要的一类物体。虽然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我们的大脑如何感知个体面部的身份或性别等方面。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。拟议的工作将联合收割机与脑成像技术，如脑电图（EEG）相结合。我们还采用了神经科学的“大数据”方法，以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的相对较小的参与者群体中进行测量，而且在大规模测试和真实世界环境中收集的参与者群体中进行测量-在“野外”。" 拟议的研究计划将侧重于了解我们如何处理和识别面孔，特别是刺激，背景和经验的各个方面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，都把重点放在了不同方位通道所携带的信息的相对重要性上，发现水平人脸结构所携带的信息与人脸识别有关。我的研究小组为推进这项工作做出了重大贡献，发现个人对水平结构的选择性预测了面部倒置效应（事实上，颠倒的脸比直立的脸更难识别），水平结构与熟悉和学习过的面孔的上级识别有关，除了影响行为外，水平信息还会影响早期与面部相关的大脑标记。 目前提出的研究解决了一些未回答的问题，包括超越人脸识别来评估人脸处理的其他关键方面，以及人脸处理的不同方面如何相互作用以及与我们看待人脸的背景相互作用。具体来说，我们问如何刺激的方式提出影响的看法和神经处理的面孔。我们探讨了在不同的背景下，如判断身份与性别处理面孔之间的异同。我们的目标是开发一种方法来帮助个人更好地识别人脸，利用我们迄今为止所学到的关于人脸感知的知识来创建独特的培训计划。我们还将增加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可以解释个体在整个面部识别能力范围内的面部感知--从最差的面部识别者到最好的面部识别者？

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?