RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Idiosyncratic, Retinotopic Bias in Face Identification Modulated by Familiarity
JF eneuro
JO eNeuro
FD Society for Neuroscience
SP ENEURO.0054-18.2018
DO 10.1523/ENEURO.0054-18.2018
VO 5
IS 5
A1 Visconti di Oleggio Castello, Matteo
A1 Taylor, Morgan
A1 Cavanagh, Patrick
A1 Gobbini, M. Ida
YR 2018
UL http://www.eneuro.org/content/5/5/ENEURO.0054-18.2018.abstract
AB The perception of gender and age of unfamiliar faces is reported to vary idiosyncratically across retinal locations such that, for example, the same androgynous face may appear to be male at one location but female at another. Here, we test spatial heterogeneity for the recognition of the identity of personally familiar faces in human participants. We found idiosyncratic biases that were stable within participants and that varied more across locations for low as compared to high familiar faces. These data suggest that like face gender and age, face identity is processed, in part, by independent populations of neurons monitoring restricted spatial regions and that the recognition responses vary for the same face across these different locations. Moreover, repeated and varied social interactions appear to lead to adjustments of these independent face recognition neurons so that the same familiar face is eventually more likely to elicit the same recognition response across widely separated visual field locations. We provide a mechanistic account of this reduced retinotopic bias based on computational simulations.