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Creating Virtual-hand and Virtual-face Illusions to Investigate Self-representation
06:53

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Published on: March 1, 2017

Face perception in the mind's eye.

Ruthger Righart1, Nicolas Burra, Patrik Vuilleumier

  • 1Laboratory for Neurology and Imaging of Cognition, Department of Neuroscience, School of Medicine, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland. ruthger.righart@med.uni-muenchen.de

Brain Topography
|November 6, 2010
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Visual perception can fill in missing facial information. Seeing eyes alone can activate a memory of the whole face, influencing early brain responses during face recognition.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Visual Perception
  • Psychology

Background:

  • Perceptual filling-in is a phenomenon where the brain recognizes stimuli under limited viewing conditions.
  • The role of filling-in during face perception and the specific neural stages involved remain unclear.
  • Previous research suggests that even partial facial features, like eyes, can evoke a sense of identity.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether missing facial information is filled-in during face perception.
  • To determine which neural stages are implicated in this potential filling-in process.
  • To explore the influence of memory traces on early visual encoding of faces.

Main Methods:

  • Participants viewed full faces in a first phase, followed by eyes-only in a second phase.
  • Experimental conditions varied whether the eyes in phase 2 were preceded by the full face or by identical eyes-only in phase 1.
  • Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to measure brain activity.

Main Results:

  • An N170 component showed increased negativity when eyes were preceded by a whole face compared to eyes-only.
  • A late positive complex (LPC) indicated enhanced retrieval of face memory representations when eyes followed a full face.
  • These ERP effects suggest memory influences visual encoding within 170 ms of stimulus onset.

Conclusions:

  • Pre-existing representations of face identity can modulate early visual processing stages.
  • The findings support the concept of top-down memory modulation in visual recognition.
  • This modulation likely contributes to filling-in missing facial information during perception.