Famous Faces Research Articles

Modulation of face processing by top-down attention: Insights from early ERP waveforms

The face fusiform area (FFA) plays a pivotal role in face recognition, yet the precise timeline of its activity remains debated. Using EEG, we conducted three experiments to investigate how expectancy-consistent versus expectancy-inconsistent visual stimuli influence processing dynamics. Participants viewed images of faces, houses, and tools (Experiment 1), celebrity faces (Experiment 2), or animal faces (Experiment 3), preceded by a priming question. Notably, both conditions presented identical visual stimulation, ensuring that observed differences stemmed from cognitive processing rather than sensory input. Our results from Experiments 2 and 3 reveal that while the initial 150 ms period, crucial for unconscious face detection, remained unaffected, subsequent processing exhibited a delay of several milliseconds for expectancy-inconsistent stimuli, indicating additional processing time required for unexpected recognition. Importantly, no significant differences were observed in Experiment 1, where less demanding tasks or generic mental imagery were used, suggesting that the priming effect was not as pronounced in this context. These findings underscore the critical role of the period immediately following the first 150 ms in face identification and individuation, highlighting the influence of top-down attention on face recognition dynamics. This study provides novel insights into the temporal dynamics of face processing and the neural mechanisms underlying top-down attentional modulation.

Perceptual and semantic deficits in face recognition in semantic dementia

State of the artSemantic dementia (SD) patients including semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and semantic behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (sbvFTD) patients show semantic difficulties identifying faces and known people related to right anterior temporal lobe (ATL) atrophy. However, it remains unclear whether they also have perceptual deficits in face recognition. MethodologyWe selected 74 SD patients (54 with svPPA and predominant left ATL atrophy and 20 with sbvFTD and predominant right ATL atrophy) and 36 cognitively healthy controls (HC) from UCSF Memory and Aging Center. They underwent a perceptual face processing test (Benton facial recognition test-short version; BFRT-S), and semantic face processing tests (UCSF Famous people battery – Recognition, Naming, Semantic associations – pictures and words subtests), as well as structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Neural correlates with the task’s performance were conducted with a Voxel-based morphometry approach using CAT12. ResultssvPPA and sbvFTD patients were impaired on all semantic face processing tests, with sbvFTD patients performing significantly lower on the famous faces’ recognition task in comparison to svPPA, and svPPA performing significantly lower on the naming task in comparison to sbvFTD. These tasks predominantly correlated with gray matter (GM) volumes in the right and left ATL, respectively. Compared to HC, both svPPA and sbvFTD patients showed preserved performance on the perceptual face processing test (BFRT-S), and performance on the BFRT-S negatively correlated with GM volume in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). ConclusionOur results suggest that early in the disease, with the atrophy mostly restricted to the anterior temporal regions, SD patients do not present with perceptual deficits. However, more severe SD cases with atrophy in right posterior temporal regions might show lower performance on face perception tests, in addition to the semantic face processing deficits. Early sparing of face perceptual deficits in SD patients, regardless of hemispheric lateralization, furthers our understanding of clinical phenomenology and therapeutical approaches of this complex disease.

Natural Language Processing Applied to Spontaneous Recall of Famous Faces Reveals Memory Dysfunction in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Patients.

Epilepsy patients rank memory problems as their most significant cognitive comorbidity. Current clinical assessments are laborious to administer and score and may not always detect subtle memory decline. The Famous Faces Task (FF) has robustly demonstrated that left temporal lobe epilepsy (LTLE) patients remember fewer names and biographical details compared to right TLE (RTLE) patients and healthy controls (HCs). We adapted the FF task to capture subjects' entire spontaneous spoken recall, then scored responses using manual and natural language processing (NLP) methods. We expected to replicate previous group level differences using spontaneous speech and semi-automated analysis. Seventy-three (N=73) adults (28 LTLE, 18 RTLE, and 27 HCs) were included in a case-control prospective study design. Twenty FF in politics, sports, and entertainment (active 2008-2017) were shown to subjects, who were asked if they could recognize and spontaneously recall as much biographical detail as possible. We created human-generated and automatically-generated keyword dictionaries for each celebrity, based on a randomly selected training set of half of the HC transcripts. To control for speech output, we measured the speech duration, total word count and content word count for the FF task and a Cookie Theft Control Task (CTT), in which subjects were merely asked to describe a visual scene. Subjects' responses to FF and CTT tasks were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed in a blinded manner with a combination of manual and automated NLP approaches. Famous face recognition accuracy was similar between groups. LTLE patients recalled fewer biographical details compared to HCs and RTLEs using both the gold-standard human-generated dictionary (24%±12% vs. 31%±12% and 30%±12%, p=0.007) and the automated dictionary (24%±12% vs. 31%±12% and 32%±13%, p=0.007). There were no group level differences in speech duration, total word count, or content word count for either the FF and CTT to explain difference in recall performance. There was a positive, statistically significant relationship between MOCA score and FF recall performance as scored by the human-generated (ρ= .327, p= .029) and automatically-generated dictionaries (ρ= .422, p= .004) for TLE subjects, but not HCs, an effect that was driven by LTLE subjects. LTLE patients remember fewer details of famous people than HCs or RTLE patients, as discovered by NLP analysis of spontaneous recall. Decreased biographical memory was not due to decreased speech output and correlated with lower MOCA scores. NLP analysis of spontaneous recall can detect memory dysfunction in clinical populations in a semi-automated, objective, and sensitive manner.

Perceptual and semantic deficits in face recognition in semantic dementia.

Semantic dementia (SD) patients including semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and semantic behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (sbvFTD) patients show semantic difficulties identifying faces and known people related to right anterior temporal lobe (ATL) atrophy. However, it remains unclear whether they also have perceptual deficits in face recognition. We selected 74 SD patients (54 with svPPA and predominant left ATL atrophy and 20 with sbvFTD and predominant right ATL atrophy) and 36 cognitively healthy controls (HC) from UCSF Memory and Aging Center. They underwent a perceptual face processing test (Benton facial recognition test-short version; BFRT-S), and semantic face processing tests (UCSF Famous people battery - Recognition, Naming, Semantic associations - pictures and words subtests), as well as structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Neural correlates with the task's performance were conducted with a Voxel-based morphometry approach using CAT12. svPPA and sbvFTD patients were impaired on all semantic face processing tests, with sbvFTD patients performing significantly lower on the famous faces' recognition task in comparison to svPPA, and svPPA performing significantly lower on the naming task in comparison to sbvFTD. These tasks predominantly correlated with gray matter (GM) volumes in the right and left ATL, respectively. Compared to HC, both svPPA and sbvFTD patients showed preserved performance on the perceptual face processing test (BFRT-S), and performance on the BFRT-S negatively correlated with GM volume in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). Our results suggest that early in the disease, with the atrophy mostly restricted to the anterior temporal regions, SD patients do not present with perceptual deficits. However, more severe SD cases with atrophy in right posterior temporal regions might show lower performance on face perception tests, in addition to the semantic face processing deficits. Early sparing of face perceptual deficits in SD patients, regardless of hemispheric lateralization, furthers our understanding of clinical phenomenology and therapeutical approaches of this complex disease.

Normative data of the Italian Famous Face Test

The faces we see in daily life exist on a continuum of familiarity, ranging from personally familiar to famous to unfamiliar faces. Thus, when assessing face recognition abilities, adequate evaluation measures should be employed to discriminate between each of these processes and their relative impairments. We here developed the Italian Famous Face Test (IT-FFT), a novel assessment tool for famous face recognition in typical and clinical populations. Normative data on a large sample (N = 436) of Italian individuals were collected, assessing both familiarity (d′) and recognition accuracy. Furthermore, this study explored whether individuals possess insights into their overall face recognition skills by correlating the Prosopagnosia Index-20 (PI-20) with the IT-FFT; a negative correlation between these measures suggests that people have a moderate insight into their face recognition skills. Overall, our study provides the first online-based Italian test for famous faces (IT-FFT), a test that could be used alongside other standard tests of face recognition because it complements them by evaluating real-world face familiarity, providing a more comprehensive assessment of face recognition abilities. Testing different aspects of face recognition is crucial for understanding both typical and atypical face recognition.

Evaluation of Different Types of Stimuli in an Event-Related Potential-Based Brain-Computer Interface Speller under Rapid Serial Visual Presentation.

Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) is currently a suitable gaze-independent paradigm for controlling visual brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) based on event-related potentials (ERPs), especially for users with limited eye movement control. However, unlike gaze-dependent paradigms, gaze-independent ones have received less attention concerning the specific choice of visual stimuli that are used. In gaze-dependent BCIs, images of faces-particularly those tinted red-have been shown to be effective stimuli. This study aims to evaluate whether the colour of faces used as visual stimuli influences ERP-BCI performance under RSVP. Fifteen participants tested four conditions that varied only in the visual stimulus used: grey letters (GL), red famous faces with letters (RFF), green famous faces with letters (GFF), and blue famous faces with letters (BFF). The results indicated significant accuracy differences only between the GL and GFF conditions, unlike prior gaze-dependent studies. Additionally, GL achieved higher comfort ratings compared with other face-related conditions. This study highlights that the choice of stimulus type impacts both performance and user comfort, suggesting implications for future ERP-BCI designs for users requiring gaze-independent systems.

Eye movement differences when recognising and learning moving and static faces.

Seeing a face in motion can help subsequent face recognition. Several explanations have been proposed for this "motion advantage," but other factors that might play a role have received less attention. For example, facial movement might enhance recognition by attracting attention to the internal facial features, thereby facilitating identification. However, there is no direct evidence that motion increases attention to regions of the face that facilitate identification (i.e., internal features) compared with static faces. We tested this hypothesis by recording participants' eye movements while they completed the famous face recognition (Experiment 1, N = 32), and face-learning (Experiment 2, N = 60, Experiment 3, N = 68) tasks, with presentation style manipulated (moving or static). Across all three experiments, a motion advantage was found, and participants directed a higher proportion of fixations to the internal features (i.e., eyes, nose, and mouth) of moving faces versus static. Conversely, the proportion of fixations to the internal non-feature area (i.e., cheeks, forehead, chin) and external area (Experiment 3) was significantly reduced for moving compared with static faces (all ps < .05). Results suggest that during both familiar and unfamiliar face recognition, facial motion is associated with increased attention to internal facial features, but only during familiar face recognition is the magnitude of the motion advantage significantly related functionally to the proportion of fixations directed to the internal features.

Clinical and neuroanatomical characterization of the semantic behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia in a multicenter Italian cohort

BackgroundSemantic behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (sbvFTD) is a neurodegenerative condition presenting with specific behavioral and semantic derangements and predominant atrophy of the right anterior temporal lobe (ATL). The objective was to evaluate clinical, neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and genetic features of an Italian sbvFTD cohort, defined according to recently proposed guidelines, compared to semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and behavioral variant FTD (bvFTD) patients.MethodsFifteen sbvFTD, sixty-three bvFTD, and twenty-five svPPA patients and forty controls were enrolled. Patients underwent clinical, cognitive evaluations, and brain MRI. Symptoms of bvFTD patients between onset and first visit were retrospectively recorded and classified as early and late. Grey matter atrophy was investigated using voxel-based morphometry.ResultssbvFTD experienced early criteria-specific symptoms: world, object and person-specific semantic loss (67%), complex compulsions and rigid thought (60%). Sequentially, more behavioral symptoms emerged (apathy/inertia, loss of empathy) along with non-criteria-specific symptoms (anxiety, suspiciousness). sbvFTD showed sparing of attentive/executive functions, especially compared to bvFTD and better language functions compared to svPPA. All sbvFTD patients failed at the famous face recognition test and more than 80% failed in understanding written metaphors and humor. At MRI, sbvFTD had predominant right ATL atrophy, almost specular to svPPA. Three sbvFTD patients presented pathogenic genetic variants.ConclusionWe replicated the application of sbvFTD diagnostic guidelines in an independent Italian cohort, demonstrating that the presence of person-specific semantic knowledge loss and mental rigidity, along with preserved executive functions and a predominant right ATL atrophy with sparing of frontal lobes, should prompt a diagnosis of sbvFTD.

Relationship between face recognition ability and anxiety tendencies in healthy young individuals: A prosopagnosia index and state-trait anxiety inventory study

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a condition that indicates the inability to recognize individuals by their faces from birth, without any history of brain damage. The assessment of face recognition ability and diagnosis of DP involve the use of face tests such as the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT) and the Cambridge Face Perception Test, along with self-reported measures like the 20-Item Prosopagnosia Index (PI20). Face recognition accuracy is affected by anxiety. However, previous studies on the relationship between face recognition ability and anxiety have not used the PI20 measure. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between self-reported measures of face recognition ability and anxiety tendencies among healthy young individuals for DP diagnosis and its implications. We used a face recognition test, involving the PI20, CFMT, Visual Perception Test for Agnosia–Famous Face Test (VPTA–FFT), and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). We assessed the performance of 116 Japanese young adults (75 females, median age of 20.7 years, with a standard deviation of 1.2). Subsequently, we conducted a statistical analysis to examine the relationship between the outcomes of the face recognition tests and STAI scores using Pearson correlation analysis and single correlation coefficients. The results showed a positive correlation between state anxiety and PI20 (r = 0.308, p = 0.007), and a weak positive correlation was also observed between trait anxiety and PI20 (r = 0.268, p = 0.04). In contrast, there was no correlation between CFMT and VPTA–FFT with respect to STAI. The results of the hierarchical multiple regression analysis also suggested that the correlation between the performance on the PI20 (self-report) and objective measures of face recognition performance (the CFMT and the VPTA–FFT) are driven by differences in anxiety. This study is the first to explore the relationship between face recognition abilities and anxiety using the PI20 self-report measure. There are implications for future research on the diagnosis of DP and the relationship between anxiety and face recognition.

DreamIdentity: Enhanced Editability for Efficient Face-Identity Preserved Image Generation

While large-scale pre-trained text-to-image models can synthesize diverse and high-quality human-centric images, an intractable problem is how to preserve the face identity and follow the text prompts simultaneously for conditioned input face images and texts. Despite existing encoder-based methods achieving high efficiency and decent face similarity, the generated image often fails to follow the textual prompts. To ease this editability issue, we present DreamIdentity, to learn edit-friendly and accurate face-identity representations in the word embedding space. Specifically, we propose self-augmented editability learning to enhance the editability for projected embedding, which is achieved by constructing paired generated celebrity's face and edited celebrity images for training, aiming at transferring mature editability of off-the-shelf text-to-image models in celebrity to unseen identities. Furthermore, we design a novel dedicated face-identity encoder to learn an accurate representation of human faces, which applies multi-scale ID-aware features followed by a multi-embedding projector to generate the pseudo words in the text embedding space directly. Extensive experiments show that our method can generate more text-coherent and ID-preserved images with negligible time overhead compared to the standard text-to-image generation process.

Deepfakes: The Legal Implications

The development of deepfakes began in 2017, when a software developer on the Reddit online platform began posting his creations in which he swapped the faces of Hollywood celebrities onto the faces of adult film artists, while in 2018, the comedic actor Jordan Peele posted a deepfake video of former U.S. President Obama insulting former U.S. President Trump and warning of the dangers of deepfake media. With the viral use of deepfakes by 2019, the U.S. House Intelligence Committee began hearings on the potential threats to U.S. security posed by deepfakes. Unfortunately, deepfakes have become even more sophisticated and difficult to detect. With easy accessibility to the applications of deepfakes, its usage has increased drastically over the last five years. Deepfakes are now designed to harass, intimidate, degrade, and threaten people and often leads to the creation and dissemination of misinformation as well as creating confusion about important state and non-state issues. A deepfake may also breach IP rights e.g., by unlawfully exploiting a specific line, trademark or label. Furthermore, deepfakes may cause more severe problems such as violation of the human rights, right of privacy, personal data protection rights apart from the copyright infringements. While just a few governments have approved AI regulations, the majority have not due to concerns around the freedom of speech. And while most online platforms such as YouTube have implemented a number of legal mechanisms to control the content posted on their platforms, it remains a time consuming and costly affair. A major challenge is that deep fakes often remain indetectable by the unaided human eye, which lead to the development by governments and private platform to develop deep-fake detecting technologies and regulations around their usage. This paper seeks to discuss the legal and ethical implications and responsibilities of the use of deepfake technologies as well as to highlight the various social and legal challenges which both regulators and the society face while considering the potential role of online content dissemination platforms and governments in addressing deep fakes.

Pamela Anderson and Marilyn Monroe: sex symbols and the naked truth

ABSTRACT Pamela Anderson is one of the latest in a long line of Hollywood sex symbols that reveal a persistent obsession with celebrities as arbiters of sexual standards and knowledge. Specifically, Anderson’s star image is situated in relation to Marilyn Monroe’s eroticised identity of the 1950s. In addition to the obvious surface similarities that exist with Anderson and Monroe (hyperfeminine, platinum blondes, Playboy centrefolds, numerous marriages, sex scandals), they both epitomise the role of sex symbol, and the tension famous women face between a public and private self, objectification and subjectivity. The public’s desire to learn about the real women behind the sex symbols becomes a quest to learn a form of ‘truth’ about sexuality itself.

“I don’t know who you are”: anomia for people’s names in Alzheimer’s disease

ABSTRACT It is well known that difficulty in the retrieval of people’s names is an early symptom of Alzheimer’s Disease Dementia (ADD), but there is a controversy about the nature of this deficit. In this study, we analyzed whether the nature of the difficulty in retrieving proper names in ADD reflects pre-semantic, semantic, or post-semantic difficulties. To do so, 85 older adults, 35 with ADD and 50 cognitively healthy (CH), completed a task with famous faces involving: recognition, naming, semantic questions, and naming with phonological cues. The ADD group scored lower than the CH group in all tasks. Both groups showed a greater capacity for recognition than naming, but this difference was more pronounced in the ADD group. Additionally, the ADD group showed significantly fewer semantic errors than the CH group. Overall results suggest that the difficulties people with ADD have in naming reflect a degradation at semantic level.

Joint Sparse Locality Preserving Regression for Discriminative Learning

Ridge Regression (RR) is a classical method that is widely used in multiple regression analysis. However, traditional RR does not take the local geometric structure of data into consideration for discriminative learning and it is sensitive to outliers as it is based on <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$L_{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula> -norm. To address this problem, this article proposes a novel method called Joint Sparse Locality Preserving Regression (JSLPR) for discriminative learning. JSLPR not only applies <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$L_{2,1}$</tex-math></inline-formula> -norm on both loss function and regularization term but also takes the local geometric structure of the data into consideration. The use of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$L_{2,1}$</tex-math></inline-formula> -norm can guarantee the robustness to outliers or noises and the joint sparsity for effective feature selection. Taking the local geometric structure into consideration can improve the performance of the feature extraction and selection method when the data lie on a manifold. To solve the optimization problem of JSLPR, an iterative algorithm is proposed and the convergence of the algorithm is also proven. Experiments on four famous face databases are conducted and the results show the merit of the proposed JSLPR on feature extraction and selection.

Analysis of Sexual Dimorphic Features of the Jawline and Chin in White Celebrity Faces.

The jawline greatly influences facial shape and contributes to facial dimorphism. Analysis of lower facial shape and sexual dimorphic differences in contemporary attractive white faces can advance the goals of lower facial aesthetics and facial gender-affirming surgery (FGAS). Full-face, front-view photos of 47 white female and 21 white male celebrities were included from a list generated using GQ magazine's Highest Paid Models issue, People Magazine's Beautiful issue (1991-2022), and celebrities featured on lifestyle websites. Facial landmarks were detected through a facial analysis program using Vision framework and MATLAB. After converting pixel distances to absolute distances, lower face measurements were compared between males and females. The mean lower facial height was 6.08cm in females and 7.00cm in males (P value<0.001). The mean bigonial width was 11.21cm in females and 12.30cm in males (P value<0.001). The ratio of facial height to lower facial height was 2.98 in females and 2.76 in males (P value<0.001), signifying that symmetry in facial thirds is more prevalent in attractive female faces, while a longer lower face is more common in attractive male faces. The greatest differences in female and male facial contours were at gonial angles and chin. Analysis of contemporary white celebrity faces demonstrated significantly wider and longer lower facial measurements in males. The overall contour of the female lower face was more tapered at the gonial angles and chin compared to males. These results are important when planning lower facial rejuvenation or FGAS, as lower face size and proportions influence perceived gender and attractiveness.

Comparative Evaluation of Facial Paradigms for Devanagari Script-based P300 Speller: Preliminary Findings

Display paradigm design is an important stage in the design of any brain-computer interface (BCI) device including the P300 speller system. Conventional grey-to-white intensification limits the usability of the existing Devanagari-script-based P300 speller (DSP3S) as it suffers from reduced visual contrast, diminished user engagement, limited personalization, minimal cognitive stimulation, and the risk of visual fatigue. The use of a facial paradigm can address the above-mentioned limitations through emotionally resonant stimuli, offering diverse cognitive stimulation, and potentially reducing visual fatigue by introducing dynamic and engaging facial stimuli. In this context, this study is the first attempt to investigate the efficacy of facial paradigms in further improving the usability of DSP3S. The authors investigated three facial paradigms based on the smiley face, famous face, and family faces for DSP3S. The three facial paradigms are evaluated based on their effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Effectiveness was measured using classification performance and amplitude difference waveform. Whereas efficiency and satisfaction were measured using NASA-TLX, VAS-F scale, and SUS respectively. The obtained results showed that using the proposed family face intensification, efficiency, and satisfaction could be improved. However, no significant difference was observed in effectiveness among the three display paradigms. In this study, apart from investigating the usability of three display paradigms, authors also propose brain signal decoding using morphological filtering and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost). Finally, the study concludes that the design of display paradigms using different intensification patterns affects the usability of the speller system and should be taken into consideration.

Resistance of a short-term memory concealed information test with famous faces to countermeasures

The concealed information test (CIT) aims at identifying knowledge that a person wants to hide, by measuring physiological indices during the presentation of known versus unknown items. Recently, Lancry-Dayan et al. (Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 7 (2), 291–302, 2018) proposed a new version of this test that included a short-term memory task to maximize differences between responses to items. Participants were asked to memorize four pictures of faces that included one face of an acquaintance. The authors observed that participants looked at the familiar face during the first second and then tended to avoid it. This specific orientation-avoidance pattern occurred even in participants instructed to conceal their familiarity with the known faces (in a spontaneous or a guided manner). In a first experiment, we reproduced Lancry-Dayan et al.’s (2018) study using photos of famous faces. The pattern found by Lancry-Dayan et al. was observed in participants asked to perform the memory task only, participants asked to conceal their familiarity with the famous faces, and participants of a countermeasure group. In a second experiment, we tested the robustness of Lancry-Dayan et al.'s countermeasure. We modified the instructions by emphasizing the oculomotor task or giving feedback. While between-group differences in gaze-pattern appeared after feedback was provided, classification analyses were still able to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar faces accurately, which revealed the good resistance of this new CIT protocol to countermeasures.

Intracerebral electrical stimulation of the face-selective right lateral fusiform gyrus transiently impairs face identity recognition

Neuroimaging and intracranial electrophysiological studies have consistently shown the largest and most consistent face-selective neural activity in the middle portion of the human right lateral fusiform gyrus (‘fusiform face area(s)’, FFA). Yet, direct evidence for the critical role of this region in face identity recognition (FIR) is still lacking. Here we report the first evidence of transient behavioral impairment of FIR during focal electrical stimulation of the right FFA. Upon stimulation of an electrode contact within this region, subject CJ, who shows typical FIR ability outside of stimulation, was transiently unable to point to pictures of famous faces among strangers and to match pictures of famous or unfamiliar faces presented simultaneously for their identity. Her performance at comparable tasks with other visual materials (written names, pictures of buildings) remained unaffected by stimulation at the same location. During right FFA stimulation, CJ consistently reported that simultaneously presented faces appeared as being the same identity, with little or no distortion of the spatial face configuration. Independent electrophysiological recordings showed the largest neural face-selective and face identity activity at the critical electrode contacts. Altogether, this extensive multimodal case report supports the causal role of the right FFA in FIR.

FamFac - A Database of Famous Faces for Psychology Experiments.

High variation in the low-level proprieties of visual stimuli and varying degrees of familiarity with famous faces may have caused a bias in the results of investigations that tried to disentangle the processes involved in familiar and unfamiliar face processing (e.g., temporal differences in the detection of the first event-related potentials specialized in face processing may have been caused by different methods of controlling variance in the low-level proprieties of visual stimuli). To address these problems, we developed a freely available database of 183 famous faces whose low-level proprieties (brightness, size, resolution) have been homogenized and the level of familiarity established. The brightness of the stimuli was standardized by a custom-developed algorithm. The size and the resolution of the pictures were homogenized in Gimp. The familiarity level of the famous faces was established by a group of 48 Portuguese college students. Our results suggest that the brightness of each image did not differ significantly from the mean brightness value of the stimuli set, confirming the standardizing ability of the algorithm. Forty-one famous faces were classified as highly familiar. This study provides two important resources, as both the algorithm and the database are freely available for research purposes. The homogenization of the low-level features and the control of the level of familiarity of the famous faces included in our database should ensure that they do not elicit confounding effects such as the ones verified in past studies.

Chronotype and Time of Day Effects on a Famous Face Recognition Task with Dynamic Stimuli.

Chronotype and Time of Day (ToD) can modulate several aspects of cognitive performance. However, there is limited evidence about the effect of these variables on face recognition performance, so the aim of the present study is to investigate this influence. For this, 274 participants (82.5% females; age 18-49 years old, mean = 27.2, SD = 1.82) were shown 20 short videoclips, each gradually morphing from a general identity unfamiliar face to a famous face. Participants should press the spacebar to stop each video as soon as they could identify the famous face, and then provide the name or an unequivocal description of the person. Analysis of response times (RT) showed that evening-types recognised the faces faster than morning-types. Considering different ToD windows, the effect of chronotype was only significant in the 13h-17h and in the 21h-6h time-windows. Altogether, results suggest an advantage of evening-types on famous face recognition using dynamic stimuli with morning-types, being particularly slower during their non-optimal period.