The speed of holistic face processing

整体人脸处理速度

• 批准号: RGPIN-2019-06849
• 负责人: Tanaka, James
• 金额: $ 3.42万
• 依托单位: University of Victoria
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2021-01-01 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=739141
• 关键词: speed; holistic; face; processing

The face of a familiar friend or colleague is recognized instantaneously without conscious effort or forethought. Although face recognition occurs quickly, little is known about the exact timing and the underlying cognitive operations and brain mechanisms that mediate fast recognition. My proposed research will introduce a novel and powerful technique to test the "how" and "when" of face recognition. We assume that rapid face recognition requires holistic processing in which a face is recognized as a whole face stimulus rather than recognition of its individual parts. An untested question in the face recognition literature is the speed at which holistic face processing occurs. In a preliminary test of rapid holistic processing (RHP) I conducted with a postdoctoral trainee, a face was flashed on the screen for 17 to 500 ms, followed by a white-noise mask. The key finding was that the eyes were better recognized in the whole face than in isolation when presented for the shortest duration of 17ms (Tanaka & Xu, 2018). Although our results suggest that holistic face recognition occurs very quickly, more stringent psychophysical tests of rapid face recognition are warranted to identify the threshold of RHP; that is, the precise exposure duration at which the whole face advantage emerges. Over the next five years, my research group will first assess the RHP threshold across converging psychophysical paradigms with an ultra-high speed 240 Hz display monitor, capable of presentation rates of 4 ms. After determining the RHP threshold, we will move on to examine the generalizability and limits of RHP. We will attempt to disrupt RHP for faces by inverting the face stimulus or scrambling its internal features. We will also test whether RHP extends to the perception of facial emotion and non-face objects (i.e., houses). Building on these experiments, we will examine the effects of perceptual experience and learning by investigating the RHP across the lifespan and in real-world and laboratory-trained experts. In related work, we will isolate the brain dynamics of rapid holistic recognition of face identity and emotion by using a frequency tagging method in electroencephalography (EEG) where individual face parts (eye, nose, mouth) will be shown at different frequency rates. By focusing on the temporal dynamics of holistic processing, our research will open up exciting, and as yet, unexplored avenues of research in face and object recognition. The experiments will yield important conceptual insights that will deepen our understanding of cognitive and neural-based theories involving the speed of face recognition. The work will significantly advance the field and lead to new measures for assessing face recognition in healthy adults and in people who experience deficits in their face recognition abilities, such as individuals with autism, schizophrenia and dementia.

一位熟悉的朋友或同事的面孔不需要刻意的努力或深思熟虑就能立刻被认出。尽管人脸识别发生得很快，但人们对快速识别的确切时间、潜在的认知操作和大脑机制知之甚少。我提出的研究将引入一种新颖而强大的技术来测试人脸识别的“方式”和“何时”。我们假设，快速人脸识别需要整体处理，在整体处理中，人脸被识别为整个人脸刺激，而不是对其个别部分的识别。人脸识别文献中一个未经检验的问题是，整体人脸处理的速度。在我对一名博士后实习生进行的快速整体处理(RHP)的初步测试中，一张脸在屏幕上闪现了17到500毫秒，然后是一个白噪音面具。关键的发现是，当眼睛呈现在最短的时间为17ms时，整个脸部的识别效果比单独呈现时更好(Tanaka&Xu，2018)。虽然我们的结果表明，整体人脸识别发生得非常快，但需要更严格的快速人脸识别的心理物理测试来确定RHP的阈值；即，整个人脸优势出现的准确暴露持续时间。在接下来的五年里，我的研究小组将首先使用一台超高速240赫兹的显示器，评估不同心理物理范式的RHP阈值，该显示器的呈现速度能够达到4ms。在确定RHP阈值之后，我们将继续检查RHP的普适性和局限性。我们将试图通过颠倒面部刺激或扰乱其内部特征来扰乱针对面部的RHP。我们还将测试RHP是否扩展到对面部情感和非面部对象(即房屋)的感知。在这些实验的基础上，我们将通过调查RHP在一生中以及在现实世界和实验室培训的专家中的作用，来检验感知经验和学习的影响。在相关工作中，我们将通过在脑电(EEG)中使用频率标记方法来分离快速整体识别人脸身份和情绪的大脑动力学，其中单个人脸部分(眼睛、鼻子、嘴巴)将以不同的频率显示。通过关注整体加工的时间动力学，我们的研究将开辟令人兴奋的、迄今尚未探索的人脸和物体识别研究途径。这些实验将产生重要的概念性见解，将加深我们对涉及人脸识别速度的认知和神经理论的理解。这项工作将极大地推进这一领域，并导致评估健康成年人和面部识别能力缺陷的人，如自闭症、精神分裂症和痴呆症患者的人脸识别的新措施。