Image-Invariant Responses in Face-Selective Regions Do Not Explain the Perceptual Advantage for Familiar Face Recognition

The ability to recognize familiar faces across different viewing conditions contrasts with the inherent difficulty in the perception of unfamiliar faces across similar image manipulations. It is widely believed that this difference in perception and recognition is based on the neural representation for familiar faces being less sensitive to changes in the image than it is for unfamiliar faces. Here, we used an functional magnetic resonance-adaptation paradigm to investigate image invariance in face-selective regions of the human brain. We found clear evidence for a degree of image-invariant adaptation to facial identity in face-selective regions, such as the fusiform face area. However, contrary to the predictions of models of face processing, comparable levels of image invariance were evident for both familiar and unfamiliar faces. This suggests that the marked differences in the perception of familiar and unfamiliar faces may not depend on differences in the way multiple images are represented in core face-selective regions of the human brain.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  Cerebral Cortex

• Publication date

  2012-02-17

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/cercor/bhs024PMID 22345357PMCID 3539454
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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