How face perception unfolds over time
Name
s41467-019-09239-1.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
898.64 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f27bf4a54c2d34a0b504fef0eef50a5e
Author(s)
Dobs, Katharina B
Isik, Leyla
Pantazis, Dimitrios
Kanwisher, Nancy
Date Issued
March 2019
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Nature
Citation
Dobs, Katharina et al., "How face perception unfolds over time." Nature Communications 10, 1 (March 2019): no. 1258 doi. 10.1038/s41467-019-09239-1 ©2019 Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Within a fraction of a second of viewing a face, we have already determined its gender, age and identity. A full understanding of this remarkable feat will require a characterization of the computational steps it entails, along with the representations extracted at each. Here, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure the time course of neural responses to faces, thereby addressing two fundamental questions about how face processing unfolds over time. First, using representational similarity analysis, we found that facial gender and age information emerged before identity information, suggesting a coarse-to-fine processing of face dimensions. Second, identity and gender representations of familiar faces were enhanced very early on, suggesting that the behavioral benefit for familiar faces results from tuning of early feed-forward processing mechanisms. These findings start to reveal the time course of face processing in humans, and provide powerful new constraints on computational theories of face perception. ©2019, The Author(s).
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09239-1
