Cognitive Neuroscience: Face Recognition, Scene Recognition, and Attention & Neglect

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the cognitive neuroscience lectures on face perception, scene processing, attention, and hemispatial neglect, including key studies, neural regions, and patient case studies.

Domain-specific versus domain-general question

The theoretical debate regarding whether a cognitive ability depends on neural mechanisms specialized for one particular category (such as faces) or on general-purpose mechanisms shared across categories. Mind is domain specific in regards to faces and places and recognition

Prosopagnosia

A neurological condition characterized by severe difficulty recognizing people by their faces, where an individual can see facial features clearly but cannot identify familiar individuals or even themselves.

Holistic face processing

The perceptual processing of individual facial features together as an integrated whole rather than recognizing each component feature independently.

Face inversion effect

A perceptual phenomenon identified by Yin ($1969$) showing that turning faces upside down disproportionately impairs recognition compared to turning non-face objects upside down, reflecting specialized upright face processing.

Parts–whole effect

A perceptual effect identified by Tanaka & Farah ($1993$) demonstrating that individuals recognize a facial feature significantly more accurately when it is presented within the context of a whole face than when viewed in isolation.

Composite face effect

An effect described by Young et al. ($1987$) where aligned top and bottom halves from different faces are perceptually integrated into a novel configuration, making it difficult to judge one half independently unless misaligned or inverted.

Fusiform face area (FFA)

A specialized cortical region identified by Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun ($1997$) that exhibits preferential neural activation in response to faces compared with non-face visual stimuli. “who’s face”

Face-selective

A neural response property where a region or neuron responds significantly more strongly to faces than to comparison stimuli, without implying an exclusive response to faces.

Wada & Yamamoto (2001)

A study linking brain-damage evidence in a prosopagnosia patient to typical face-related neural activation, demonstrating that lesions near face-processing regions cause face recognition deficits.

Tsao et al. (2006)

An fMRI-guided single-unit recording study in monkeys which discovered that $97\%$ of sampled visually responsive neurons within a targeted face patch were face-selective.

Core face-processing network

A network of three distinct face-related brain regions consisting of the fusiform face area (FFA), occipital face area (OFA), and posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS).

Scene gist

The overarching semantic category or meaning of a visual scene (e.g., "kitchen," "beach," or "city"), which human observers can reliably extract in roughly $\frac{1}{20}$ of a second.

Topographical disorientation

An impairment characterized by difficulty recognizing familiar places or navigating routes, illustrating that familiar-place knowledge and visual place recognition can dissociate.

Parahippocampal place area (PPA)

A scene-processing region identified by Epstein & Kanwisher ($1998$) that responds preferentially to scenes over non-scene objects and functions primarily in scene categorization.

Retrosplenial complex (RSC)

A core scene-processing region emphasized by Maguire ($2001$) and others that functions in map-based navigation and shows sensitivity to left–right mirror reversals.

Occipital place area (OPA)

A scene-selective region (formerly labeled TOS) that plays a direct causal role in scene perception and supports visually guided navigation.

Double dissociation in Dilks et al. (2013)

Experimental TMS evidence showing that disrupting the OPA selectively impaired scene discrimination but not face discrimination, whereas disrupting the OFA selectively impaired face discrimination but not scene discrimination.

fMRI adaptation

An experimental paradigm based on the principle that repeating a representation reduces neural activity; a renewed response to a modified stimulus indicates that a brain region distinguishes that specific change.

Mirror-reversal sensitivity (Dilks et al., 2011)

The finding that the OPA and RSC discriminate left–right mirror reversals of scenes, whereas the PPA treats mirror-reversed scenes similarly to repetitions of the original scene.

Three-system scene-processing framework

A model formulated by Persichetti & Dilks ($2018$) organizing scene perception into three functional systems: the OPA for visually guided navigation, the RSC for map-based navigation, and the PPA for scene categorization.

Attention (William James, 1890)

The focal cognitive process of taking possession by the mind of one object or train of thought out of several simultaneously possible ones, requiring withdrawal from competing information.

Hemispatial neglect

A neurological condition marked by impaired attention to stimuli or thoughts on one side of space (typically the left) that cannot be accounted for by primary sensory or visual-field deficits.

Right inferior posterior parietal lobe

The anatomical region of the brain whose damage is most typically associated with the onset of left-sided hemispatial neglect.

Extinction

A clinical phenomenon where a patient detects an isolated stimulus presented on the neglected side, but fails to report it when a competing stimulus is presented simultaneously on the opposite side.

Spatial reference frame

A coordinate system used by the central nervous system to represent spatial locations relative to an anchor point, resolving the question of "left or right of what?"

Egocentric reference frame

A viewer-centered spatial coordinate system that defines locations relative to the observer's body parts, including retina-centered, head-centered, or trunk-centered axes.

Allocentric reference frame

An environment-centered spatial coordinate system that defines locations relative to external space (such as a room or screen) rather than relative to the observer.

Object-centered reference frame

A coordinate system representing locations relative to an object's intrinsic axes and structural organization, independent of its position or orientation relative to the viewer.

Stimulus-centered representation

A spatial representation that reflects the physical, displayed arrangement of a stimulus exactly as it appears in space, regardless of canonical letter or object structure.

Word-centered representation

An abstract lexical representation that encodes the canonical spelling order of letters in a word, regardless of physical orientation, font, rotation, or visual presentation.

Patient CS

A patient with a right-hemisphere stroke and intact visual fields who exhibited egocentric, retina-centered neglect, making reading errors (such as "pounce" → "ounce") tied directly to retinal coordinates.

Patient VB

A patient with intact visual fields who exhibited object-centered, stimulus-centered neglect, where reading errors systematically tracked the physical presentation of words rather than retinal coordinates.

Patient NG

A patient who exhibited object-centered, word-centered right neglect, making errors on the canonical ends of words (such as "hound" → "house") even when words were transformed or mirror-reversed.

PSTS

expressions

OFA

Parts of a face - is this a face

Are scenes compilations of objects?

No, because we take less than 50 miliseconds to recognize place

Cognitive signatures for place

time it takes, gist