Face Processing

Question 1

Describe the ontogenetic (developmental) argument about face processing

Answer 1

Newborns visually follow schematic faces for longer periods at birth compared to non-faces (median effect observed after 9 mins of life), suggesting it’s innate

Question 2

Johnson et al. presented wooden paddles with either a face painted on it, a scrambled face, or blank, to newborns 30 mins after birth, and measured how far they’d follow it (degree of rotation of head or eyes). Which one did they follow the longest?

Answer 2

The face, followed by scrambled face

Question 3

According to the developmental argument, at what age have babies been found to imitate facial expressions of adults?

Answer 3

Between 12 and 21 days

Question 4

When Farroni et al. presented babies between 2-5 days old with averted vs. direct eye gazes, what was found when they measured their saccadic eye movements?

Answer 4

They preferred the direct gaze

Question 5

What did Bushnell find babies between 12 and 36 hours old begin to recognise and prefer over 3 days?

Answer 5

Their mother’s face over a stranger’s (they identify their primary care-giver’s face as different from others)

Question 6

What demonstrates that the results of Bushnell’s study was an interactive process?

Answer 6

They have to be exposed for a sufficiently long period (over 6 hrs) for it to work; avoids the argument that the mother’s face is important from birth independently of interaction (comes through time and interaction)

Question 7

The inversion effect refers to an inverted face not being as easy to recognise as upright faces. When Yin had Ps identify upright and inverted faces, houses and planes, what happened?

Answer 7

An inversion effect was more marked for face recognition than other categories (this is present for familiar faces as well)

Question 8

Which illusion shows that upside down faces are processed differently?

Answer 8

The Thatcher illusion

Question 9

Objects (e.g. houses) might differ according to their parts (first order differences), and may be distinguished locally. How do faces differ from this according to Diamond and Carey?

Answer 9

They have similar parts and differ only in terms of their configuration (second order/configurational differences), which need to be processed in a global (or holistic) manner

Question 10

Lesions in which brain region has been implicated in prosopagnosia?

Answer 10

Right ventral temporo-occipital

Question 11

Prosopagnosics can determine local parts of a face, and notice specific details, but what can’t they determine?

Answer 11

The configuration (global processing) as a whole; they use other cues not related to configuration

Question 12

Farah et al. tested prosopagnosic patient LH and controls in the identification of faces and glasses, to compare whether the level of difficulty was the same. What did they find?

Answer 12

LH was worse than controls for faces but not for glasses, suggesting there’s no deficit in recognising different exemplars within the same category (it’s specialised to faces)

Question 13

Kanwisher et al. used fMRI to localise regions processing faces by comparing brain activation for faces and for objects in healthy Ps. In which area did they observe activation when subtracting objects from faces?

Answer 13

Right fusiform gyrus (or fusiform face area - FFA)

Question 14

When activity for face activation was subtracted from object activation in Kanwisher’s study, what was found?

Answer 14

The opposite contrast: more bilateral activation in bilateral adjacent regions for objects; there’s a double dissociation for these stimuli

Question 15

In Kanwisher’s study, to make sure the effects weren’t confounded with low level features (e.g. luminance/intensity, etc), they compared faces to scrambled faces (closer association) What was observed?

Answer 15

Still activation in right FFA for faces, suggesting this area must be critical to face recognition

Question 16

In Kanwisher’s study, to exclude differences due to intra-category vs. inter-category, comparisons of faces and houses were compared with rest (fixation). What was observed, and what may have been a problem with this approach?

Answer 16

Again, activation in right FFA for faces; but there may have been biased brain responses to living vs. non-living stimuli

Question 17

To exclude an effect of animate vs. inanimate stimuli (biological vs. manmade), what did Kanwisher compare next, and what was found?

Answer 17

Faces and hands; still the same region for faces

Question 18

The FFA is therefore selective for face processing. This was lateralised on the right in 5/10 right-handed Ps and bilaterally in the other 5. What about the two left-handed Ps?

Answer 18

One in the left FFA and the other bilateral

Question 19

Gauthier and Tarr wanted to know if the FFA is specific to faces or visual expertise, so they developed the “greebles” stimuli which must be processed configurally. What was their reasoning, and what did they do?

Answer 19

They reasoned that we develop the ability to process faces based on exposure and learning, which could be applied to any complex stimuli; so they created complex stimuli (greebles) and taught Ps to be specialists in learning and recognising them by gender (plok/glip) and family

Question 20

Gauthier and Tarr had 5 Ps compare two successive stimuli (faces or greebles; upright or inverted) in an fMRI scanner, and compared their responses before and after training. What were the results?

Answer 20

Before training, the FFA reacted more to upright faces than to greebles (more so on the right); with training (5-6 sessions), the FFA reacted more and more to greebles; suggesting as they became experts in greebles they started to use the face areas; visual specialisation not specific to human faces

Question 21

What’s a criticism of Gauthier’s study?

Answer 21

The greebles look quite similar to faces so it’d make sense that we’d employ the same areas

Question 22

Based on the assumption that experts in complex stimuli (e.g. butterflies) should show FFA activation for these, Rhodes et al. compared brain activations for faces butterflies and objects in novices and experts in butterflies. The task was to look passively or identify individually. What was found?

Answer 22

Right FFA showed greater activation for faces than butterflies for novices, trained novices and butterfly experts; increased FFA response for trained novices and much stronger for experts, but still not as strong as faces

Question 23

What did Rhodes et al. conclude in their butterfly vs. faces study?

Answer 23

FFA activity is not activated by the identifications of members of a category (individuation) , and is not linked to visual expertise for a category of stimuli (e.g. butterflies), but is specific to faces

Question 24

Describe the model developed by Haxby et al. in terms of the neural distinctions between the core system and extended system as mediators of face perception

Answer 24

Core system: comprised of occipitotemporal regions in extrastriate visual cortex (mediating visual analysis of faces); representation of invariant aspects by FFA; representation of changeable aspects in STS; Extended system: comprised of neural regions involved in other cognitive functions that can act concurrently with core system regions to extract meaning from faces

Question 25

Which specific component for facial encoding has been found in ERP studies?

Answer 25

N170

Question 26

Bentin et al. compared ERP to faces, cars, scrambled faces and scrambled cars, and looked at how the electrical activity varied over time. What did they find?

Answer 26

They observed a negative deflection at 170ms on temporal electrodes (T5 and T6) for faces but not for the other stimuli; not just a question of where it’s being processed but a specific moment in time (N170)

Question 27

When Bentin et al. attempted to determine whether body parts in isolation can produce the N170, what did they discover?

Answer 27

N170 was greater for eyes, followed by faces, noses, then mouths