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Related Experiment Videos

The M170 is selective for faces, not for expertise.

Yaoda Xu1, Jia Liu, Nancy Kanwisher

  • 1Psychology Department, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, USA. yaoda.xu@yale.edu

Neuropsychologia
|February 18, 2005
PubMed
Summary

The brain

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Visual Perception
  • Neuroimaging

Background:

  • The brain's mechanisms for processing faces are well-studied, but whether these mechanisms are specific to faces or generalize to other expert visual categories remains debated.
  • The M170, a magnetoencephalography (MEG) response peaking around 170 ms, is a known neural marker associated with early face identification.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether the face-selective M170 response is specific to face processing or if it is modulated by visual expertise in other object categories.
  • To determine if enhanced visual expertise with objects like cars recruits the same neural mechanisms as face perception.

Main Methods:

  • Magnetoencephalography (MEG) was used to measure brain activity in response to visual stimuli.
  • Two experiments compared the M170 response in individuals with high visual expertise (e.g., car experts) versus control subjects.
  • Participants viewed faces and other objects (e.g., cars) while their M170 response was recorded and correlated with identification accuracy.

Main Results:

  • Car experts did not show a significantly higher M170 response to cars compared to control subjects, unlike the response typically seen for faces.
  • The M170 amplitude was positively correlated with the accuracy of individual face identification.
  • Crucially, M170 amplitude was not correlated with the accuracy of car identification in car experts.

Conclusions:

  • The findings suggest that the neural mechanisms underlying the M170 response are selectively tuned for face processing.
  • These early face-selective mechanisms do not appear to generalize to the processing of other visual stimuli, even for highly trained experts.
  • The M170 serves as a specific neural signature for face identification, rather than a general mechanism for processing any expert visual category.

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