It matters who you are: Biography modulates the neural dynamics of facial identity representation

Abstract

Recognizing the face of a person is an essential capacity to our social life. However, to interact properly with others we also need to know to which person a face belongs. Here we tested how person knowledge modulates face processing. Participants were familiarized with highly variable faces, associated with artificial biographies. Crucially, participants were allocated randomly into two groups, trained on the identical faces of the same persons, but with reversed person knowledge associated with the faces. Multivariate pattern analyses were used to examine the time course of identity representations in the EEG data. We estimated cross-participant, leave-one-participant-out pairwise identity classifications within the same face-person association groups and compared them to the those performed across association groups. We observed that face-person knowledge associations led to a robust familiarity signal from 300 ms and to a rapidly emerging identity representation, starting from 80 ms. Importantly, the shared associations within participant groups led to a longer-lasting and stronger face identity representation over the right posterior electrode cluster when compared to cross-group comparisons with reversed associations. The direct comparison of within and cross-group classifications showed that an early stage of identity representation, between 250 and 370 ms, is significantly modulated by face-biography associations. Our findings suggest that top-down, person recognition memory related information modulates visual face identity representation already at an early processing stage. Our study provides new insights into the spatiotemporal dynamics of how person-related conceptual, biographical knowledge modulates familiar identity representation.