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Real-life experience with personally familiar faces enhances discrimination based on global information.

ABSTRACT: Despite the agreement that experience with faces leads to more efficient processing, the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. Building on empirical evidence from unfamiliar face processing in healthy populations and neuropsychological patients, the present experiment tested the hypothesis that personal familiarity is associated with superior discrimination when identity information is derived based on global, as opposed to local facial information. Diagnosticity and availability of local and global information was manipulated through varied physical similarity and spatial resolution of morph faces created from personally familiar or unfamiliar faces. We found that discrimination of subtle changes between highly similar morph faces was unaffected by familiarity. Contrariwise, relatively more pronounced physical (i.e., identity) differences were more efficiently discriminated for personally familiar faces, indicating more efficient processing of global, as opposed to local facial information through real-life experience.

SUBMITTER: Ramon M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4741065 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Real-life experience with personally familiar faces enhances discrimination based on global information.

Ramon Meike M Van Belle Goedele G

PeerJ 20160104

Despite the agreement that experience with faces leads to more efficient processing, the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. Building on empirical evidence from unfamiliar face processing in healthy populations and neuropsychological patients, the present experiment tested the hypothesis that personal familiarity is associated with superior discrimination when identity information is derived based on global, as opposed to local facial information. Diagnosticity and availability of loca ...[more]

PMID: 26855852

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Project description:BackgroundThe Vegetative State (VS) is a severe disorder of consciousness in which patients are awake but display no signs of awareness. Yet, recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have demonstrated evidence for covert awareness in VS patients by recording specific brain activations during a cognitive task. However, the possible existence of incommunicable subjective emotional experiences in VS patients remains largely unexplored. This study aimed to probe the question of whether VS patients retain a brain ability to selectively process external stimuli according to their emotional value and look for evidence of covert emotional awareness in patients.Methods and findingsIn order to explore these questions we employed the emotive impact of observing personally familiar faces, known to provoke specific perceptual as well as emotional brain activations. Four VS patients and thirteen healthy controls first underwent an fMRI scan while viewing pictures of non-familiar faces, personally familiar faces and pictures of themselves. In a subsequent imagery task participants were asked to actively imagine one of their parent's faces. Analyses focused on face and familiarity selective regional brain activations and inter-regional functional connectivity. Similar to controls, all patients displayed face selective brain responses with further limbic and cortical activations elicited by familiar faces. In patients as well as controls, Connectivity was observed between emotional, visual and face specific areas, suggesting aware emotional perception. This connectivity was strongest in the two patients who later recovered. Notably, these two patients also displayed selective amygdala activation during familiar face imagery, with one further exhibiting face selective activations, indistinguishable from healthy controls.ConclusionsTaken together, these results show that selective emotional processing can be elicited in VS patients both by external emotionally salient stimuli and by internal cognitive processes, suggesting the ability for covert emotional awareness of self and the environment in VS patients.

Dataset Information

Real-life experience with personally familiar faces enhances discrimination based on global information.

Publications

Real-life experience with personally familiar faces enhances discrimination based on global information.

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