Face Perception: Effects of stimulus, context, and experience

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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?