Determinants of Face Recognition: The Role of Target Prevalence and Similarity.

Studies of facial identity processing typically assess perception (via matching) and/or memory (via recognition), with experimental designs differing with respect to one important aspect: Target Prevalence. Some designs include "target absent" (TA) among "target present" (TP) trials. In visual search tasks, TA trials shift an observer's decisional criterion towards a stricter one, increasing misses. However, decisional biases will differ between individuals and across an individual's decisions as well. In this way, excluding TA trials ensures comparable levels of expectation and thus a more controlled decisional bias both within and between observers by not considering correct rejections and false alarms. However, TA trials may occur, e.g., in police line-ups, where it is important to consider observers' face recognition ability net of the potential biases introduced by TA and TP trials. And, while these have been investigated in numerous other stimulus domains, their effects have not yet been extended to face recognition. We therefore sought to fill this void by testing different versions of the previously established Models Memory Test, which measures old/new recognition of experimentally learned facial identities. Our study found significant expectation effects, driven by target prevalence that persist even given prevalence changes. This implies that face recognition - even measured with naturalistic changes - is influenced by prior perceptual decisions.

Psychophysical profiles in super-recognizers.

Facial identity matching ability varies widely, ranging from prosopagnosic individuals (who exhibit profound impairments in face cognition/processing) to so-called super-recognizers (SRs), possessing exceptional capacities. Yet, despite the often consequential nature of face matching decisions-such as identity verification in security critical settings-ability assessments tendentially rely on simple performance metrics on a handful of heterogeneously related subprocesses, or in some cases only a single measured subprocess. Unfortunately, methodologies of this ilk leave contributions of stimulus information to observed variations in ability largely un(der)specified. Moreover, they are inadequate for addressing the qualitative or quantitative nature of differences between SRs' abilities and those of the general population. Here, therefore, we sought to investigate individual differences-among SRs identified using a novel conservative diagnostic framework, and neurotypical controls-by systematically varying retinal availability, bandwidth, and orientation of faces' spatial frequency content in two face matching experiments. Psychophysical evaluations of these parameters' contributions to ability reveal that SRs more consistently exploit the same spatial frequency information, rather than suggesting qualitatively different profiles between control observers and SRs. These findings stress the importance of optimizing procedures for SR identification, for example by including measures quantifying the consistency of individuals' behavior.

The Case of the Cognitive (Opti)miser: Electrophysiological Correlates of Working Memory Maintenance Predict Demand Avoidance.

People are often considered cognitive misers. When given a free choice between two tasks, people tend to choose tasks requiring less cognitive effort. Such demand avoidance (DA) is associated with cognitive control, but it is still not clear to what extent individual differences in cognitive control can account for variations in DA. We sought to elucidate the relation between cognitive control and cognitive effort preferences by investigating the extent to which sustained neural activity in a task requiring cognitive control is correlated with DA. We hypothesized that neural measures of efficient filtering will predict individual variations in demand preferences. To test this hypothesis, we had participants perform a delayed-match-to-sample paradigm with their ERPs recorded, as well as a separate behavioral demand-selection task. We focused on the ERP correlates of cognitive filtering efficiency (CFE)-the ability to ignore task-irrelevant distractors during working memory maintenance-as it manifests in a modulation of the contralateral delay activity, an ERP correlate of cognitive control. As predicted, we found a significant positive correlation between CFE and DA. Individuals with high CFE tended to be significantly more demand avoidant than their low-CFE counterparts. Low-CFE individuals, in comparison, did not form distinct cognitive effort preferences. Overall, our results suggest that cognitive control over the contents of visual working memory contribute to individual differences in the expression of cognitive effort preferences. This further implies that these observed preferences are the product of sensitivity to cognitive task demands.

Artificially-generated scenes demonstrate the importance of global scene properties for scene perception.

Recent electrophysiological research highlights the significance of global scene properties (GSPs) for scene perception. However, since real-world scenes span a range of low-level stimulus properties and high-level contextual semantics, GSP effects may also reflect additional processing of such non-global factors. We examined this question by asking whether Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to GSPs will still be observed when specific low- and high-level scene properties are absent from the scene. We presented participants with computer-based artificially-manipulated scenes varying in two GSPs (spatial expanse and naturalness) which minimized other sources of scene information (color and semantic object detail). We found that the peak amplitude of the P2 component was sensitive to the spatial expanse and naturalness of the artificially-generated scenes: P2 amplitude was higher to closed than open scenes, and in response to manmade than natural scenes. A control experiment showed that the effect of Naturalness on the P2 is not driven by local texture information, while earlier effects of naturalness, expressed as a modulation of the P1 and N1 amplitudes, are sensitive to texture information. Our results demonstrate that GSPs are processed robustly around 220 ms and that P2 can be used as an index of global scene perception.

The influence of behavioral relevance on the processing of global scene properties: An ERP study.

Recent work studying the temporal dynamics of visual scene processing (Harel et al., 2016) has found that global scene properties (GSPs) modulate the amplitude of early Event-Related Potentials (ERPs). It is still not clear, however, to what extent the processing of these GSPs is influenced by their behavioral relevance, determined by the goals of the observer. To address this question, we investigated how behavioral relevance, operationalized by the task context impacts the electrophysiological responses to GSPs. In a set of two experiments we recorded ERPs while participants viewed images of real-world scenes, varying along two GSPs, naturalness (manmade/natural) and spatial expanse (open/closed). In Experiment 1, very little attention to scene content was required as participants viewed the scenes while performing an orthogonal fixation-cross task. In Experiment 2 participants saw the same scenes but now had to actively categorize them, based either on their naturalness or spatial expense. We found that task context had very little impact on the early ERP responses to the naturalness and spatial expanse of the scenes: P1, N1, and P2 could distinguish between open and closed scenes and between manmade and natural scenes across both experiments. Further, the specific effects of naturalness and spatial expanse on the ERP components were largely unaffected by their relevance for the task. A task effect was found at the N1 and P2 level, but this effect was manifest across all scene dimensions, indicating a general effect rather than an interaction between task context and GSPs. Together, these findings suggest that the extraction of global scene information reflected in the early ERP components is rapid and very little influenced by top-down observer-based goals.

Ultra-dense EEG sampling results in two-fold increase of functional brain information.

Contemporary high-density electroencephalographic systems (hd-EEG) comprising up to 256 electrodes have inter-electrode separations of 2-4 cm. Because electric currents of the brain are believed to strongly diffuse before reaching the scalp surface, higher-density electrode coverage is often deemed unnecessary. We used an ultra-dense electroencephalography (ud-EEG) sensor array to reveal strong potential variation at 1cm scale and discovered that it reflects functional brain activity. A new classification paradigm demonstrates that ud-EEG provides twice the signal to noise ratio for brain-response classification compared with contemporary hd-EEG. These results suggest a paradigm shift from current thinking by showing that higher spatial resolution sampling of EEG is required and leads to increased functional brain information that is useful for diverse neurological applications.

VEP correlates of feedback in human cortex.

It is known that neural responses become less dependent on the stimulus size and location along the visual pathway. This study aimed to use this property to find evidence of neural feedback in visually evoked potentials (VEP). High-density VEPs evoked by a contrast reversing checkerboard were collected from 15 normal observers using a 128-channel EEG system. Surface Laplacian method was used to calculate skull-scalp currents corresponding to the measured scalp potentials. This allowed us to identify several distinct foci of skull-scalp currents and to analyse their individual time-courses. Response nonlinearity as a function of the stimulus size increased markedly from the occipital to temporal loci. Similarly, the nonlinearity of reactivations (late evoked response peaks) over the occipital, lateral-occipital, and frontal scalp regions increased with the peak latency. Response laterality (contralateral vs. ipsilateral) was analysed in lateral-occipital and temporal loci. Early lateral-occipital responses were strongly contralateral but the response laterality decreased and then disappeared for later peaks. Responses in temporal loci did not differ significantly between contralateral and ipsilateral stimulation. Overall, the results suggest that feedback from higher-tier visual areas, e.g., those in temporal cortices, may significantly contribute to reactivations in early visual areas.