Perceptual difficulty modulates the direction of information flow in familiar face recognition

Hamid Karimi-Rouzbahani*, Farzad Ramezani, Alexandra Woolgar, Anina Rich, Masoud Ghodrati*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

30 Citations (Scopus)
125 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Humans are fast and accurate when they recognize familiar faces. Previous neurophysiological studies have shown enhanced representations for the dichotomy of familiar vs. unfamiliar faces. As familiarity is a spectrum, however, any neural correlate should reflect graded representations for more vs. less familiar faces along the spectrum. By systematically varying familiarity across stimuli, we show a neural familiarity spectrum using electroencephalography. We then evaluated the spatiotemporal dynamics of familiar face recognition across the brain. Specifically, we developed a novel informational connectivity method to test whether peri-frontal brain areas contribute to familiar face recognition. Results showed that feed-forward flow dominates for the most familiar faces and top-down flow was only dominant when sensory evidence was insufficient to support face recognition. These results demonstrate that perceptual difficulty and the level of familiarity influence the neural representation of familiar faces and the degree to which peri-frontal neural networks contribute to familiar face recognition.

Original languageEnglish
Article number117896
Pages (from-to)1-15
Number of pages15
JournalNeuroImage
Volume233
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2021

Bibliographical note

Copyright the Author(s) 2021. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.

Keywords

  • face recognition
  • familiar faces
  • multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA)
  • representational similarity analysis (RSA)
  • informational brain connectivity

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