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Rapid Neural Representations of Personally Relevant Faces
Mareike Bayer1, Oksana Berhe1,2, Isabel Dziobek1
1Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 10999 Berlin, Germany.
Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
|May 14, 2021
Summary
Personal relevance of familiar faces is detected rapidly, within 100 milliseconds. This involves visual and prefrontal brain regions, updating models of face perception.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Psychology
- Social Neuroscience
Background:
- Face perception is crucial for social interaction.
- Previous studies show rapid decoding of basic facial attributes (gender, age, identity) using EEG/MEG within 100 ms.
- The neural mechanisms and timing of representing personal face relevance remain unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the temporal dynamics and neural circuitry underlying the perception of personal face relevance.
- To examine brain responses to emotional faces of varying personal relevance (partners, friends, stranger).
Main Methods:
- Simultaneous electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were employed.
- Cross-modal representational similarity analyses were used to combine EEG and fMRI data.
- Neural responses to emotional faces of partners, friends, and a stranger were analyzed.
Main Results:
- Representations of personal relevance emerge as early as 100 ms, preceding structural encoding.
- Correlated representations were found in the visual cortex.
- Activity in prefrontal and midline regions, associated with value representation and self-relevant information processing, also showed correlated representations.
Conclusions:
- The perception of personal face relevance is a rapid process.
- Neural circuitry for personal relevance detection extends beyond the core face processing network, involving prefrontal and midline regions.
- Current models of face perception require updates to incorporate the rapid detection of personal relevance.
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