L10: Faces: Developmental, Neuropsychological, and Neuroimaging Perspectives

Fantz (1961, 1963)

showed newborn preferences for high contrast bullseye patterns than for blank field of uniform color, babies are born with some form of pattern vision

Goren, Sarty, and Wu (1975)

newborn infants tracked a moving schematic face, scrambled face, or a blank head outline — intact face preferred

Johnson et al (1991)

more visual tracking of realistic than non realistic face-like stimuli in 1 hour old babies

Early Face Discrimination

Walton et al (1992): babies can discriminate mother’s face from other faces by 1-4 days old

Bower (1992): newborns suck more strongly to see videotape of mother’s face than stranger’s face

Pascalis et al (2002)

adults, 6-month, and 9-month olds familiarize to human and primate faces

perceptual windows narrows during first year as face processing is tuned to human template

Kelly et al (2007)

at 3 months equal discrimination of all races, by 9 months white infants can only reliably discriminate white faces

Newcombe (1969)

temporal lobe injury — face perception problems

parietal lobe injury — spatial problems

Prosopagnosia (Bodamer, 1947)

impaired recognition of familiar faces over and above impairment with other familiar objects

Farah (1990)

both left and right hemisphere involved in prosopagnosia, but right is dominant

De Renzi (1986)

described prosopagnosic who was unimpaired at many other within-category tasks (discrimination of animals, coins, cutlery)

is prosopagnosia face specific?

Hanley (2000)

describes agnostic with difficulty telling animals aprt, but who is unimpaired with faces

is agnosia object specific?

Acquired Prosopagnosia

cases due to brain damage usually in occipital and temporal lobes

Developmental/Congenital Prosopagnosia

present from early life, extreme difficulties with face recognition reflective failure to develop cognitive/neural mechanisms for processing faces, many are unaware of their prosopagnosia

Fusiform Gyrus Face Perception

fusiform regions respond more strongly to faces

Chimeric Faces—Hemispheric Asymmetry

Wolff (1933): the left side of a picture of a person’s face is more like the person than the right side, concluded that the right half of a person’s face was more expressive of their personality

Gilbert and Bakan (1973): the bias lies in the perceiver’s brain and not in the face that is being perceived

Burt and Perrett (1997): right hemisphere dominance for perception of attractiveness, age, gender, emotional expression