Familiar Faces Research Articles

Neural correlates of face familiarity in institutionalised children and links to attachment disordered behaviour.

One of the most well-documented sequelae of early maltreatment and institutionalisation is attachment problems, including behaviours under the labels of reactive attachment disorder (RAD) and disinhibited social engagement disorder (DSED). Despite growing evidence of the neurobiological effects of institutionalisation, the neural correlates of these behavioural patterns are largely unknown. The current study examined effects of both institutionalisation in general and attachment disordered behaviour, in particular, on brain-based markers of face processing, in 100 Portuguese children (70 currently institutionalised, 30 continuously raised by their families). Children's neural processing of caregiver's and stranger's faces was assessed with Event-Related Potentials (ERPs). Compared to children from the community, institutionalised children showed smaller amplitudes in the N170, to both stranger and caregiver faces. Amongst the institutionalised group, living in a setting with a higher children-to-caregivers' ratio was associated with smaller P400 amplitudes. The display of DSED symptoms was associated with a smaller P1 to both faces, as well as a reduced differentiation between faces in P400 amplitudes and smaller P400 to the stranger's face. In contrast, RAD symptoms were not associated with any ERP measures. Results replicate previously reported hypoactivation in institutionalised children, in a less-globally deprived setting than past work, indicating that such a pattern is associated with lack of individualised care and increased symptoms of DSED.

Unfamiliar faces might as well be another species: Evidence from a face matching task with human and monkey faces

ABSTRACT Humans are good at recognizing familiar faces, but are more error-prone at recognizing an unfamiliar person across different images. It has been suggested that familiar and unfamiliar faces are processed qualitatively differently. But are unfamiliar faces at least processed differently from monkey faces? Here we tested 366 volunteers on a face matching test – two images presented side-by-side with participants judging whether the images show the same identity or two different identities – comparing performance with familiar and unfamiliar human faces, and monkey faces. The results showed that performance was most accurate for familiar faces, and was above chance for monkey faces. Although accuracy was higher for unfamiliar humans than monkeys on different identity trials, there was no unfamiliar human advantage over monkeys on same identity trials. The results give new insights into unfamiliar face processing, showing that in some ways unfamiliar faces might as well be another species.

Face familiarity revealed by fixational eye movements and fixation-related potentials in free viewing

Event-related potentials (ERPs) and the oculomotor inhibition (OMI) in response to visual transients are known to be sensitive to stimulus properties, attention, and expectation. We have recently found that the OMI is also sensitive to face familiarity. In natural vision, stimulation of the visual cortex is generated primarily by saccades, and it has been recently suggested that fixation-related potentials (FRPs) share similar components with the ERPs. Here, we investigated whether FRPs and microsaccade inhibition (OMI) in free viewing are sensitive to face familiarity. Observers freely watched a slideshow of seven unfamiliar and one familiar facial images presented randomly for 4-s periods, with multiple images per identity. We measured the occipital fixation-related N1 relative to the P1 magnitude as well as the associated fixation-triggered OMI. We found that the average N1-P1 was significantly smaller and the OMI was shorter for the familiar face, compared with any of the seven unfamiliar faces. Moreover, the P1 was suppressed across saccades for the familiar but not for the unfamiliar faces. Our results highlight the sensitivity of the occipital FRPs to stimulus properties such as face familiarity and advance our understanding of the integration process across successive saccades in natural vision.

Correction to “Alkenes, Brought to You in Familiar Faces”

ADVERTISEMENT RETURN TO ARTICLES ASAPAddition/CorrectionNEXTORIGINAL ARTICLEThis notice is a correctionCorrection to “Alkenes, Brought to You in Familiar Faces”Irosha N. Nawarathne*Irosha N. NawarathneMore by Irosha N. Nawarathnehttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-7104-3556Cite this: J. Chem. Educ. 2022, XXXX, XXX, XXX-XXXPublication Date (Web):November 17, 2022Publication History Published online17 November 2022https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.2c01056© 2022 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.RIGHTS & PERMISSIONSArticle Views-Altmetric-Citations-LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InReddit PDF (546 KB) Get e-Alerts Get e-Alerts

Effects of face repetition on ventral visual stream connectivity using dynamic causal modelling of fMRI data

Stimulus repetition normally causes reduced neural activity in brain regions that process that stimulus. Some theories claim that this “repetition suppression” reflects local mechanisms such as neuronal fatigue or sharpening within a region, whereas other theories claim that it results from changed connectivity between regions, following changes in synchrony or top-down predictions. In this study, we applied dynamic causal modeling (DCM) on a public fMRI dataset involving repeated presentations of faces and scrambled faces to test whether repetition affected local (self-connections) and/or between-region connectivity in left and right early visual cortex (EVC), occipital face area (OFA) and fusiform face area (FFA). Face “perception” (faces versus scrambled faces) modulated nearly all connections, within and between regions, including direct connections from EVC to FFA, supporting a non-hierarchical view of face processing. Face “recognition” (familiar versus unfamiliar faces) modulated connections between EVC and OFA/FFA, particularly in the left hemisphere. Most importantly, immediate and delayed repetition of stimuli were also best captured by modulations of connections between EVC and OFA/FFA, but not self-connections of OFA/FFA, consistent with synchronization or predictive coding theories, though also possibly reflecting local mechanisms like synaptic depression.

2022 Hope Babette Tang Humanism in Healthcare Essay Contest: Second-Place Nursing Student Essay: A Song for the Dying.

2022 Hope Babette Tang Humanism in Healthcare Essay Contest: Second-Place Nursing Student Essay: A Song for the Dying.

Perceptual similarity modulates effects of learning from variability on face recognition

Face recognition is a challenging classification task that humans perform effortlessly for familiar faces. Recent studies have emphasized the importance of exposure to high variability appearances of the same identity to perform this task. However, these studies did not explicitly measure the perceptual similarity between the learned images and the images presented at test, which may account for the advantage of learning from high variability. Particularly, randomly selected test images are more likely to be perceptually similar to learned high variability images, and dissimilar to learned low variability images. Here we dissociated effects of learning from variability and study-test perceptual similarity, by collecting human similarity ratings for the study and test images. Using these measures, we independently manipulated the variability between the learning images and their perceptual similarity to the test images. Different groups of participants learned face identities from a low or high variability set of images. The learning phase was followed by a face matching test (Experiment 1) or a face recognition task (Experiment 2) that presented novel images of the learned identities that were perceptually dissimilar or similar to the learned images. Results of both experiments show that perceptual similarity between study and test, rather than image variability at learning per se, predicts face recognition. We conclude that learning from high variability improves face recognition for perceptually similar but not for perceptually dissimilar images. These findings may not be specific to faces and should be similarly evaluated for other domains.

No semantic information is necessary to evoke general neural signatures of face familiarity: evidence from cross-experiment classification

Recent theories on the neural correlates of face identification stressed the importance of the available identity-specific semantic and affective information. However, whether such information is essential for the emergence of neural signal of familiarity has not yet been studied in detail. Here, we explored the shared representation of face familiarity between perceptually and personally familiarized identities. We applied a cross-experiment multivariate pattern classification analysis (MVPA), to test if EEG patterns for passive viewing of personally familiar and unfamiliar faces are useful in decoding familiarity in a matching task where familiarity was attained thorough a short perceptual task. Importantly, no additional semantic, contextual, or affective information was provided for the familiarized identities during perceptual familiarization. Although the two datasets originate from different sets of participants who were engaged in two different tasks, familiarity was still decodable in the sorted, same-identity matching trials. This finding indicates that the visual processing of the faces of personally familiar and purely perceptually familiarized identities involve similar mechanisms, leading to cross-classifiable neural patterns.

Deactivating attachment strategies associate with early processing of facial emotion and familiarity in middle childhood: an ERP study

ABSTRACT Neurophysiological evidence suggests associations between attachment and the neural processing of emotion expressions. This study asks whether this relationship is also evident in middle childhood, and how it is affected by facial familiarity. Attachment strategies (deactivation, hyperactivation) were assessed in 51 9- to 11-year olds using a story stem completion task. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during children's passive viewing of mother and stranger emotional faces (angry/happy). At the stage of facial information encoding (N250), attachment deactivation was associated with a pattern pointing to increased vigilance towards angry faces. Further, the attention-driven LPP was increased to happy mother faces as highly salient stimuli overall, but not in children scoring high on deactivation. These children did not discriminate between mothers’ facial emotions and showed a general attentional withdrawal from facial stimuli. While our results on attachment deactivation support a two-stage processing model, no effect of hyperactivation was found.

ONOMASTIC GAME IN E.P. ROSTOPCHINA’s PLAY “THE RETURN OF CHATSKY TO MOSCOW”

The article is devoted to the issues of onomastics. The author, using the example of a little-studied play by E.P. Rostopchina “The return of Chatsky to Moscow or the Meeting of Familiar Faces after a Twenty-Five Years' Separation” (1856) considers the examples of an onomastic game that reveals the idea of the work more fully, emphasizes the author's position, and testifies to the originality of the writer's artistic world. The studies of linguists and literary critics have repeatedly confirmed the importance of onomastics in the interpretation of a literary text, complementing the ideological, thematic and artistic aspects of the work. In the article, thanks to a comparative analysis of the anthroponyms of the famous comedy by A.S. Griboyedov and plays by E.P. Rostopchina the significance of the work “The Woes of Wit” in Russian literature and the literary life of Russia in the middle of the 19th century is emphasized. The material for analysis involves not only anthroponyms, but also phaleronyms, which rarely become the subject for study in the context of a literary work. It is worth mentioning, that E.P. Rostopchina, having written a kind of continuation of the comedy “The Woes of Wit” organically included the most vivid anthroponyms created by A.S. Griboyedov within the framework of the classic tradition in the plot of her work, and created new bright and ambiguous names of heroes, counting on a thoughtful and erudite reader.

No Justice, No Peace: Queer Afghans in Life and Death, from Home to Diasporas

In May 2016, while I was attending my first LGBTQ+ Muslim Retreat in the United States, I was looking for familiar faces and those with similar backgrounds as mine: Afghan, Muslim, refugee, queer. I found them all except for the Afghan part. On the very first day of the conference after a long day of attending workshops, I rested my head on one of the new friend's lap as everyone was sitting in a healing circle, talking, sharing their stories and laughing. The languages spoken in this circle varied from English to Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, and Farsi. I was yearning for someone who would speak Dari or Pashto to me. This was the first time I had found myself in a circle of Muslims who also happened to be LGBTQ+. It felt like I had found my home. Yet, there was something missing, my native languages, Dari and Pashto. It was like I needed to hear a queer or trans person speak my tongue. I shared this desire with my new friend whose lap had become my resting nest for hours. He immediately said the name “Wazina.” Do you know Wazina? He asked. No, I don't, I responded. I immediately jumped out of his lap, facing him asking him more about Wazina.Wazina and I, both Afghan, Muslim, refugee and queer, met in person four years later in October 2020 after months of Zoom calls and talks. Our first in person meeting was not an ordinary one. We met during a pandemic. We met at my place in Philadelphia with our bags that carried our kafans, secret items we wanted to leave behind, souvenirs from our pasts and items that we wanted our loved ones to remember us with after we die.This was in preparation for our artistic project and performance: Khuda Bowad Yarat/When I Am No Longer Here. In our past Zoom calls and continued conversations, we both nostalgically talked about Afghanistan, a place we both call home, our queer Afghan Muslim refugee experiences, our love lives and deaths. Will our families mourn us after we die if they find out who we were? Will our loved ones find out about our secret lives and lovers? Where will we be buried?About our performance piece: Khuda Bowad Yarat/When I Am No Longer Here is a visual recreation and reconciliation with queer Muslim death and burial rights that asks if we can fully expose who we are before death. With the Khuda Bowad Yarat/When I Am No Longer Here performance, we hope to reclaim our rites of passage as queer Muslims and as well as find ways to heal in our lives.We have dedicated this performance to those of us, queer, displaced, marginalized, third culture, hiding, surviving, striving, and deeply desiring the traditions and rituals that give us peace of heart, but knowing they aren't always guaranteed to us or reflect us in our true forms.Based on this performance, in this conversation, we (Qais and Wazina) will discuss queer Muslim life, death, secrets, and the ways we find healings in our journeys of life. This was a conversation conducted over Zoom while Qais had returned to Kabul, Afghanistan, after a decade in exile and Wazina was in New York.

“What Blood Unites, the Sea Shall Not Divide”: Bohemian Day at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893

“What Blood Unites, the Sea Shall Not Divide”: Bohemian Day at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893

Top-down modulation and cortical-AMG/HPC interaction in familiar face processing.

Humans can accurately recognize familiar faces in only a few hundred milliseconds, but the underlying neural mechanism remains unclear. Here, we recorded intracranial electrophysiological signals from ventral temporal cortex (VTC), superior/middle temporal cortex (STC/MTC), medial parietal cortex (MPC), and amygdala/hippocampus (AMG/HPC) in 20 epilepsy patients while they viewed faces of famous people and strangers as well as common objects. In posterior VTC and MPC, familiarity-sensitive responses emerged significantly later than initial face-selective responses, suggesting that familiarity enhances face representations after they are first being extracted. Moreover, viewing famous faces increased the coupling between cortical areas and AMG/HPC in multiple frequency bands. These findings advance our understanding of the neural basis of familiar face perception by identifying the top-down modulation in local face-selective response and interactions between cortical face areas and AMG/HPC.

The importance of internal and external features in recognizing faces that vary in familiarity and race.

Familiar and unfamiliar faces are recognized in fundamentally different ways. One way in which recognition differs is in terms of the features that facilitate recognition: previous studies have shown that familiar face recognition depends more on internal facial features (i.e., eyes, nose and mouth), whereas unfamiliar face recognition depends more on external facial features (i.e., hair, ears and contour). However, very few studies have examined the recognition of faces that vary in both familiarity and race, and the reliance on different facial features, whilst also using faces that incorporate natural within-person variability. In the current study, we used an online version of the card sorting task to assess adults’ (n = 258) recognition of faces that varied in familiarity and race when presented with either the whole face, internal features only, or external features only. Adults better recognized familiar faces than unfamiliar faces in both the whole face and the internal features only conditions, but not in the external features only condition. Reasons why adults did not show an own-race advantage in recognition are discussed.

Characterizing the shared signals of face familiarity: Long-term acquaintance, voluntary control, and concealed knowledge

In a recent study using cross-experiment multivariate classification of EEG patterns, we found evidence for a shared familiarity signal for faces, patterns of neural activity that successfully separate trials for familiar and unfamiliar faces across participants and modes of familiarization. Here, our aim was to expand upon this research to further characterize the spatio-temporal properties of this signal. By utilizing the information content present for incidental exposure to personally familiar and unfamiliar faces, we tested how the information content in the neural signal unfolds over time under different task demands – giving truthful or deceptive responses to photographs of genuinely familiar and unfamiliar individuals. For this goal, we re-analyzed data from two previously published experiments using within-experiment leave-one-subject-out and cross-experiment classification of face familiarity. We observed that the general face familiarity signal, consistent with its previously described spatio-temporal properties, is present for long-term personally familiar faces under passive viewing, as well as for acknowledged and concealed familiarity responses. Also, central-posterior regions contain information related to deception. We propose that signals in the 200–400 ms window are modulated by top-down task-related anticipation, while the patterns in the 400–600 ms window are influenced by conscious effort to deceive. To our knowledge, this is the first report describing the representational dynamics of concealed knowledge for faces, using time-resolved multivariate classification.

From the Chair

On September 10, 2022, in Tampa, Florida, the Business Valuation Committee convened during the 85th International Appraisers Conference. We thank our business valuation conference planning committee members, cochairs Laurie-Leigh White, ASA, and Ken Pia, ASA, and Todd Larson, ASA, Jeff Tarbell, ASA, and Ronald Seigneur, ASA. The conference was well attended and held both in person and via video formats. It was great to come back together again and see so many familiar faces and make new acquaintances. Conference speakers included Roger Grabowski, FASA, Ron Seigneur, ASA, Chris Rosenthal, ASA, Chris Mercer, FASA, Michael Gregory, ASA, and Jay Fishman, FASA. Additionally, Roger received ASA's new Shannon Pratt Award, which recognizes business valuation members with notable contributions to the appraisal community. Make sure you save the date for the next International Appraisers Conference to be held in New Orleans, October 1 to 3, 2023.The BVC welcomed new committee members Dan Daitchman, ASA, and Brian Crotty, ASA. Dan hails from Chicago and is a managing director at B. Riley Advisory Services. Brian is a director at HDH Advisors, LLC, in Des Moines.At our BV Committee meeting, we discussed appraisal standards, ESG-IA, and education, among other topics. Richard Wise, ASA, standards committee chair, stated the 2021 USPAP will be in effect until December 31, 2022, and the subcommittee will be looking into standards as they relate to ligation assignments and possible conflicts, particularly at the federal level. Also appraisal standards, in general, are being considered in light of the impact of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) factors and the valuation of an enterprise.Adam Smith, ASA, is looking to put together an ESG-IA subcommittee. He participates in an international working group that examines financial standards as they relate to ESG-IA, board of directors, regulators, and stakeholders. The ESG-IA working group references standards of the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG), the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). The international ESG-IA working group is collaborating on a white paper that will discuss the metrics and quantitative disclosures that can impact enterprise value.In education subcommittee news, Bill Johnston, ASA, discussed new upcoming one-day courses that are being planned and our first ever ESOP Virtual Conference held June 21. The conference was well attended with timely topics, including discussion of the landmark Bowers case, the increase in class action lawsuits by private plaintiffs, and the do-away of control premiums by trustees. Liza Bowersox, our webinars education chair, discussed increasing the number of one-hour webinars to add to our collection of two-hour webinars and to suggest that conference speakers also do an extension of their topic into a webinar.Since releasing the sixth edition of Valuing a Business (VAB6), the ASA has made the text available online in electronic format. Additionally, our POV education courses are being revised to coincide with the layout of VAB6, which is now overseen by the ASA as Dr. Shannon Pratt's legacy to the business valuation community. We are already in talks to update the sixth edition, possibly as early as 2023, as well as work on another text originally authored by Dr. Pratt.The BVC will now have meetings quarterly, all being via teleconference with the one in-person meeting taking place at the annual conference. You are welcome to guest at any of these meetings, and I also highly encourage you to volunteer for subcommittees or even seek a position as a BVC member. Ultimately, the ASA needs our members to support its sustainability and future.

A patient with persistent prosopagnosia after right posterior cerebral artery territorial infarction

Prosopagnosia is a specific form of visual agnosia that impairs the ability to recognise familiar faces. Prosopagnosia is typically considered for bilateral ventro-occipitotemporal lesions involving the fusiform face area. A 72-year-old right-handed woman presented with persistent inability to recognise familiar faces after cerebral infarction. Brain magnetic resonance imaging demonstrated infarction in the right medial occipital lobe, including the lingual and fusiform gyri. She showed decreased facial recognition abilities in a face recognition test consisting of famous Koreans. This case suggests that there can be individual-specific degrees of hemispheric dominance for face processing, and unilateral right occipitotemporal lesion is sufficient to produce persistent prosopagnosia.

The IES Comes Together [Message from the President

Finally, after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, in early June, one of our flagship conferences the 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Electronics and Administrative Committee was held in hybrid form in Anchorage, Alaska, USA. It was nice to meet familiar faces and feel the excitement of the conference and meeting friends we have only seen on computer screens recently. In the future, we are planning our next major conference, the 2022 Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IECON’22), to be held in an in-person format, if only no other external factors hamper us. So, we will continue excellent scientific discussions and renewed collaboration among the many excellent research centers that actively participate in our conferences.

The Reflected Face as a Mask of the Self: An Appraisal of the Psychological and Neuroscientific Research About Self-face Recognition

This study reviews research about the recognition of one’s own face and discusses scientific techniques (especially the instrument of the mirror) to investigate differences in brain activation when looking at familiar faces compared to unfamiliar ones. Our analysis highlights how people do not possess a perception of their own face that corresponds precisely to reality, and how the awareness of one’s face can also be modulated by means of the enfacement illusion. This illusion allows one to maintain a sense of self at the expense of a precise discrimination of self-face. The internal dynamics of different brain processes, associated with the construction of bodily identity and the sense of self and capable of integrating signals from different sensory channels, particularly visual and tactile, create a mirror-mask effect. According to this effect, the self-face reflected by a mirror becomes a mask for the self, which has the features of the subject’s face, but nonetheless does not correspond perfectly to its characteristics. This poses interesting questions about the nature and construction of one’s self, as self-face reflections allow the mind to mediate between analogue and virtual reality, between past and future events, between memories and plans of action and, most importantly, between beliefs about our identities.

Neural correlates of subordinate-level categorization of own- and other-race faces in infancy

Perceptual narrowing is a domain-general process in which infants move from a broad sensitivity to a wide range of stimuli to developing expertise within often experienced native stimuli (Maurer & Werker, 2014). One outcome of this is the own-race bias, characterized by an increasing difficulty in discriminating other-race faces with age and experience for those raised in a racially homogenous environment (Anzures, Quinn, Pascalis, Slater, Tanaka, & Lee, 2013). Theorists have proposed that this is due to a categorization-individuation process, wherein infants begin to categorize non-native stimuli but continue to individuate native stimuli (Hugenberg, Young, Bernstein, & Sacco, 2010; Nelson, 2001). Exposure to multiple exemplars during initial learning has been found to facilitate infant categorization of other-species faces while exposure to a single exemplar does not (Dixon, Reynolds, Romano, Roth, Stumpe, Guy, & Mosteller, 2019). The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of initial learning conditions on infants' ability to individuate and categorize own- and other-race faces. Ten-month-old infants were familiarized with a single exemplar or multiple exemplars of own- or other-race faces. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while infants were presented with the familiar face(s) they were exposed to during familiarization, novel faces from the same race used during familiarization, and novel faces from a race other than the one used in familiarization. Infants familiarized with a single exemplar, regardless of race, showed significant differences in both the Nc component (Negative central, associated with visual attention) and the LSW (late slow wave, associated with recognition memory) between familiar and novel faces at the subordinate-level category of race. No differences were found across familiarization conditions for the P400 component associated with face processing. Infants familiarized with multiple exemplars showed no evidence of discriminating faces at the categorical or individual level. Results suggest that, in contrast to other-species faces, infants at this age may process human faces more efficiently when familiarized with a single exemplar. The implications of the current findings are discussed in relation to the impact of initial learning conditions on infants' ability to individuate and categorize own- and other-species faces and social implications of infants' processing of other-race faces.