It's Who, Not What That Matters: Personal Relevance and Early Face Processing

Overview

Journal Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci

Specialties Neurology
Social Sciences

Date 2023 Apr 20

PMID 37079756

Authors

Mareike Bayer

Tom Johnstone

Isabel Dziobek

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The faces of our friends and loved ones are among the most pervasive and important social stimuli we encounter in our everyday lives. We employed electroencephalography to investigate the time line of personally relevant face processing and potential interactions with emotional facial expressions by presenting female participants with photographs of their romantic partner, a close friend and a stranger, displaying fearful, happy and neutral facial expressions. Our results revealed elevated activity to the partner's face from 100 ms after stimulus onset as evident in increased amplitudes of P1, early posterior negativity, P3 and late positive component, while there were no effects of emotional expressions and no interactions. Our findings indicate the prominent role of personal relevance in face processing; the time course of effects further suggests that it might not rely solely on the core face processing network but might start even before the stage of structural face encoding. Our results suggest a new direction of research in which face processing models should be expanded to adequately capture the dynamics of the processing of real-life, personally relevant faces.

Citing Articles

Familiarity Processing through Faces and Names: Insights from Multivoxel Pattern Analysis.

Castro-Laguardia A, Ontivero-Ortega M, Morato C, Lucas I, Vila J, Bobes Leon M Brain Sci. 2024; 14(1).

PMID: 38248254 PMC: 10813351. DOI: 10.3390/brainsci14010039.

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