PSYC 112: Face Perception Lecture Flashcards

A set of 30 vocabulary flashcards covering the neuroanatomy, behavioral paradigms, clinical patient cases, and core theoretical debates of face perception and facial affect recognition from the PSYC 112 lecture.

Prosopagnosia

A selective impairment in recognizing familiar faces that is not explained by general visual, intellectual, or memory deficits; a specific type of visual agnosia.

Face specificity hypothesis

The hypothesis that face perception is carried out by specialized cognitive and neural machinery distinct from that engaged in general object perception.

Expertise hypothesis

The domain-general hypothesis that face-like processing reflects extensive perceptual practice discriminating exemplars within a category and can apply to non-face categories of expertise.

Holistic processing

The perceptual processing of visual stimuli as integrated wholes on the basis of their overall configuration and spatial relations, rather than as independent components.

Featural processing

The perceptual processing of isolated individual components (such as the size or shape of a nose) independently of the spatial relations among the parts.

Part-whole effect

The behavioral finding that individual facial features are recognized significantly better within the context of an intact face than in isolation, an index of holistic processing described by Tanaka and Farah.

Inversion effect

A disproportionate drop in recognition accuracy when visual stimuli are presented upside down compared to upright, which is significantly greater for faces than for non-face objects.

Thatcher illusion

The failure to detect grotesque local feature inversions (such as flipped eyes and mouth) in an inverted face due to disrupted configural processing, first demonstrated by Thompson in 1980.

Composite effect

The finding that individuals are slower and less accurate at identifying a face half when aligned with an incongruent half than when misaligned, reflecting automatic holistic integration.

Fusiform face area (FFA)

A functionally defined visual area located in the lateral fusiform gyrus that responds significantly more strongly to faces than to non-face objects and primarily codes face identity.

Occipital face area (OFA)

A face-selective cortical region located in the inferior occipital gyrus involved in the early perceptual analysis of physical facial features and components.

Superior temporal sulcus (STS)

A sulcus in the lateral temporal lobe containing face-selective neurons that process dynamic, changeable aspects of faces, including eye gaze direction, lip movements, and expressions.

N170

An event-related potential component peaking as a negative wave approximately $170\,\text{ms}$ after stimulus onset over occipitotemporal sites, showing a larger amplitude for faces than for non-face objects.

Double dissociation

A neuropsychological pattern where Patient 1 shows function A damaged and function B intact, while Patient 2 shows function B damaged and function A intact, proving the functions use distinct neural systems.

Patient WJ

A stroke patient described by McNeil and Warrington who performed at chance ($50\%$) on human face recognition but showed intact, superior recognition for individual sheep faces.

Patient CK

An agnosic patient who suffered impaired object recognition but displayed intact face recognition, scoring $7.0$ out of $7$ on Mooney faces and only $1.0$ out of $9$ on objects.

Greebles

Novel computer-generated 3-D visual stimuli grouped into families and individuals, designed to investigate perceptual expertise and configural processing during laboratory training.

Simulation theory (ST)

The embodied cognition framework proposing that individuals recognize and understand others' emotional expressions by vicariously reproducing the corresponding somatomotor states in themselves.

Somatosensory cortex (SC)

The primary and secondary sensory cortex in the parietal lobe representing bodily and facial sensation, recruited during sensorimotor simulation to recognize facial affect.

Basic-level advantage

The typical perceptual phenomenon where individuals categorize stimuli faster at the basic category level than at subordinate levels, an advantage that disappears as perceptual expertise develops.

Functional localizer

An independent fMRI scan contrast (such as Faces minus Objects) used to identify and isolate a candidate region of interest within an individual participant before running further tests.

Region of interest (ROI)

A pre-defined anatomical or functional cluster of voxels selected in advance to test specific hypotheses while avoiding the multiple-comparisons problem in neuroimaging.

Subordinate-level classification

The categorization or discrimination of individual exemplars within a shared category (such as identifying a specific person) rather than classifying objects at the broader basic level.

Developmental prosopagnosia

A lifelong deficit in face recognition that presents without detectable acquired brain lesions or neurological trauma, frequently displaying familial transmission.

Invariant aspects of faces

Stable physical properties of faces—most notably individual identity and structure—that do not change across different views or movements, predominantly processed by the FFA.

Changeable aspects of faces

Dynamic facial cues—such as emotional expressions, gaze shifts, and mouth movements—that change across time, predominantly processed by the posterior STS.

Core system of face perception

The visual network defined in Haxby et al.'s model consisting of the inferior occipital gyri (OFA), lateral fusiform gyrus (FFA), and superior temporal sulcus (STS).

Parahippocampal place area (PPA)

A specialized region on the ventral underside of the brain near the hippocampus that responds selectively to scenes, landscapes, and spatial layouts rather than faces.

Embodied cognition

The theoretical approach positing that cognitive and emotional processing is fundamentally grounded in, and shaped by, physiological states and sensorimotor representations of the body.

Within-category discrimination

The fine perceptual differentiation between distinct individual exemplars belonging to the same general object class, such as telling two faces or two sheep apart.