Integrative EEG/fMRI evidence for a multi-scale network underlying self-face and personal-object recognition

The sense of ownership of our faces and possessions shapes our visual perception. While the neural basis of self-face recognition has been well-studied, the neural basis of recognizing personally owned objects remains poorly understood. The main aim of this study was to investigate brain activity underlying self-face and personal object recognition, with a particular focus on the extent to which the ownership processing can be characterized as either domain-general and/or stimulus-specific. We first review the relevant literature and then report findings from two experiments - one using EEG and the other fMRI - in which the same 30 participants categorized images of faces and objects as either "mine" or "others". EEG results revealed ownership-related visuo-midfrontal activity, reflected in event-related potentials (visual P1 and N170, and midfrontal N150 and SMN), frequency-specific inter-source phase coherence (in theta band), and brain-wide time-frequency power dynamics (in alpha, beta, and theta bands). fMRI results identified ownership-related activity in four right hemisphere regions: the inferior temporal gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and superior parietal lobule; each of which formed distinct ownership-related subnetworks. The findings support "a hybrid model" in which stimulus-specific visual pathways (e.g., face-sensitive regions) interact with domain-general frontal activity encoding self-relevance. This integrative evidence clarifies how a dynamic, multi-scale network underlying ownership perception is constructed across time, frequency, and brain space.