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Do you recognize me? The neural marker to familiar faces

PIYUSH SWAMI1, 2*, TAPAN K. GANDHI3 and SNEH ANAND1, 2
  • 1 Indian Institute of Technology, Center for Biomedical Engineering, India
  • 2 All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Center for Biomedical Engineering, India
  • 3 Defence Research & Development Organization, Defence Institute of Physiology & Allied Sciences, India

Previous psychophysiological investigations on visual perception have led in depth understanding of relationship between memory and processing of faces in human brain. Various evidences suggest that the representation of faces especially; human faces follows a highly dedicated and complex neuronal circuitry. It has been well established that brain follows a top-down approach for decoding of the previously stored visual images. However, despite the notwithstanding research efforts, it is largely unknown the neural mechanism to distinguish familiar from unfamiliar faces. The aim of this research is to develop a conjectural model for comprehending and discussing how we distinguish familiar from unfamiliar faces. The experimental procedure required the participants to precisely categorize the three types of visual stimuli into familiar, personally familiar and completely unfamiliar human faces behaviourally. Secondly, Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from sixteen healthy subjects ranged in age from 20 to 24 years (22.31±1.40; 10M, 6F). Results indicate the structural encoding of faces reflected by face-specific N170 component was elicited for all three categories of faces; while time-locked activity of ERPs evidenced by N400 component was elicited only for familiar faces. The significant occurrence of high latency for the unfamiliar category of faces suggests the inability to extract unique spatial information (required for face recognition) from novel images to recognise as familiar or personally familiar.The observations highlight the behavioural correlation with neural signature obtained from ERP study for the classification and final identification of faces.

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Acknowledgements

Authors would like to acknowledge all the participants and staff of CBME (IIT Delhi) for their sincere cooperation during the study.

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Keywords: face recognition, Top-Down, Event-Related Potentials(ERPs), N170, N400

Conference: Neuroinformatics 2013, Stockholm, Sweden, 27 Aug - 29 Aug, 2013.

Presentation Type: Poster

Topic: Computational neuroscience

Citation: SWAMI P, GANDHI TK and ANAND S (2013). Do you recognize me? The neural marker to familiar faces. Front. Neuroinform. Conference Abstract: Neuroinformatics 2013. doi: 10.3389/conf.fninf.2013.09.00092

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Received: 07 Apr 2013; Published Online: 11 Jul 2013.

* Correspondence: Mr. PIYUSH SWAMI, Indian Institute of Technology, Center for Biomedical Engineering, New Delhi, Delhi, 110016, India, piyushswami@yahoo.com