Dataset Information

Eye Movement Dynamics Differ between Encoding and Recognition of Faces.

ABSTRACT: Facial recognition is widely thought to involve a holistic perceptual process, and optimal recognition performance can be rapidly achieved within two fixations. However, is facial identity encoding likewise holistic and rapid, and how do gaze dynamics during encoding relate to recognition? While having eye movements tracked, participants completed an encoding ("study") phase and subsequent recognition ("test") phase, each divided into blocks of one- or five-second stimulus presentation time conditions to distinguish the influences of experimental phase (encoding/recognition) and stimulus presentation time (short/long). Within the first two fixations, several differences between encoding and recognition were evident in the temporal and spatial dynamics of the eye-movements. Most importantly, in behavior, the long study phase presentation time alone caused improved recognition performance (i.e., longer time at recognition did not improve performance), revealing that encoding is not as rapid as recognition, since longer sequences of eye-movements are functionally required to achieve optimal encoding than to achieve optimal recognition. Together, these results are inconsistent with a scan path replay hypothesis. Rather, feature information seems to have been gradually integrated over many fixations during encoding, enabling recognition that could subsequently occur rapidly and holistically within a small number of fixations.

SUBMITTER: Arizpe JM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6802769 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Eye Movement Dynamics Differ between Encoding and Recognition of Faces.

Arizpe Joseph M JM Noles Danielle L DL Tsao Jack W JW Chan Annie W-Y AW

Vision (Basel, Switzerland) 20190212 1

Facial recognition is widely thought to involve a holistic perceptual process, and optimal recognition performance can be rapidly achieved within two fixations. However, is facial identity encoding likewise holistic and rapid, and how do gaze dynamics during encoding relate to recognition? While having eye movements tracked, participants completed an encoding ("study") phase and subsequent recognition ("test") phase, each divided into blocks of one- or five-second stimulus presentation time cond ...[more]

PMID: 31735810

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Project description:Eye-movement patterns are often utilized in studies of visual perception as indices of the specific information extracted to efficiently process a given stimulus during a given task. Our prior work, however, revealed that not only the stimulus and task influence eye-movements, but that visuomotor (start position) factors also robustly and characteristically influence eye-movement patterns to faces (Arizpe et al., 2012). Here we manipulated lateral starting side and distance from the midline of face and line-symmetrical control (butterfly) stimuli in order to further investigate the nature and generality of such visuomotor influences. First we found that increasing starting distance from midline (4°, 8°, 12°, and 16° visual angle) strongly and proportionately increased the distance of the first ordinal fixation from midline. We did not find influences of starting distance on subsequent fixations, however, suggesting that eye-movement plans are not strongly affected by starting distance following an initial orienting fixation. Further, we replicated our prior effect of starting side (left, right) to induce a spatially contralateral tendency of fixations after the first ordinal fixation. However, we also established that these visuomotor influences did not depend upon the predictability of the location of the upcoming stimulus, and were present not only for face stimuli but also for our control stimulus category (butterflies). We found a correspondence in overall left-lateralized fixation tendency between faces and butterflies. Finally, for faces, we found a relationship between left starting side (right sided fixation pattern tendency) and increased recognition performance, which likely reflects a cortical right hemisphere (left visual hemifield) advantage for face perception. These results further indicate the importance of considering and controlling for visuomotor influences in the design, analysis, and interpretation of eye-movement studies.

Project description:People have a memory advantage for faces that belong to the same group, for example, that attend the same university or have the same personality type. Faces from such in-group members are assumed to receive more attention during memory encoding and are therefore recognized more accurately. Here we use event-related potentials related to memory encoding and retrieval to investigate the neural correlates of the in-group memory advantage. Using the minimal group procedure, subjects were classified based on a bogus personality test as belonging to one of two personality types. While the electroencephalogram was recorded, subjects studied and recognized faces supposedly belonging to the subject's own and the other personality type. Subjects recognized in-group faces more accurately than out-group faces but the effect size was small. Using the individual behavioral in-group memory advantage in multivariate analyses of covariance, we determined neural correlates of the in-group advantage. During memory encoding (300 to 1000 ms after stimulus onset), subjects with a high in-group memory advantage elicited more positive amplitudes for subsequently remembered in-group than out-group faces, showing that in-group faces received more attention and elicited more neural activity during initial encoding. Early during memory retrieval (300 to 500 ms), frontal brain areas were more activated for remembered in-group faces indicating an early detection of group membership. Surprisingly, the parietal old/new effect (600 to 900 ms) thought to indicate recollection processes differed between in-group and out-group faces independent from the behavioral in-group memory advantage. This finding suggests that group membership affects memory retrieval independent of memory performance. Comparisons with a previous study on the other-race effect, another memory phenomenon influenced by social classification of faces, suggested that the in-group memory advantage is dominated by top-down processing whereas the other-race effect is also influenced by extensive perceptual experience.

Dataset Information

Eye Movement Dynamics Differ between Encoding and Recognition of Faces.

Publications

Eye Movement Dynamics Differ between Encoding and Recognition of Faces.

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