Face Recognition and Perception

Bridging Sensory Extraction and Decision Dynamics: Face Pareidolia Emergent from Bottom-Up and Top-Down Interactions

This study investigates face pareidolia by analyzing EEG data during RSVP streams, showing that it results from both feedforward and top-down processes.

The first comprehensive case study of early-emerging prosopometamorphopsia

This paper presents the first comprehensive case study of early-emerging prosopometamorphopsia, detailing its clinical manifestations and neural correlates.

Anatomical Connectivity of the Macaque Gaze-following Patch

The paper investigates the anatomical connectivity of the macaque gaze-following patch and finds reciprocal connections with the inferior parietal lobule and sparse labeling in the amygdala, but no clear prefrontal cortex connections.

Eye gaze is not inversion-proof: A robust, sex-invariant gaze inversion effect

The paper investigates how face inversion affects sensitivity to gaze direction, finding a robust inversion effect that is largely sex-invariant.

Disrupting the Right Inferior Frontal Gyrus Increases Social Brain Activity During Emotion Recognition

Lateral recurrence dynamically refines visual representations for task performance

This study shows that lateral recurrence in neural networks enhances identity separability in trained domains through dynamic refinement of representational geometry.

Naturalistic face-directed attention predicts face recognition ability

This study shows that naturalistic face-directed attention predicts face recognition ability, with gaze patterns accounting for 22% of the variance in recognition performance.

Shifts in neural representations, not gaze, track how people reinterpret ambiguous social scenes

The paper shows that reinterpretation of ambiguous social scenes is linked to representational shifts in association cortex, not changes in gaze.

Facial color properties affect perceived age.

The paper investigates how facial color properties influence perceived age, finding that red-green contrast and redness levels affect youthfulness perception independently of luminance.

Behavioral characterization of dynamic facial expression perception in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) using naturalistic and synthetic stimuli

This study shows rhesus monkeys can categorize facial expressions and generalize to novel stimuli, with performance influenced by expression components and signaler characteristics.

Real versus virtual faces: Differentiating neural responses to emotional expressions

The paper compares neural responses to real and virtual faces expressing different emotions, finding distinct brain activity patterns for face type and emotional expression.

Standardized human tests show that most vision models are face-blind

The paper tests AI models on standardized face recognition tasks and finds most perform worse than humans, with some showing face-blindness similar to human prosopagnosia.

Selective encoding failure of self-face identity in subthreshold depression

This study investigates whether subthreshold depression involves a selective deficit in encoding self-face identity, finding a specific impairment in incidentally encoding self-face identity compared to other-faces.

Ensemble viewing reshapes neural representations of same-race and other-race faces

This study examines how neural representations of same-race and other-race faces differ when viewed individually versus in ensembles, finding format-dependent decoding advantages and race-organized ensemble representations.

Emotional Modulation of Face Working Memory Precision in Specific Learning Disorders: Valence Flattening and Mnemonic Distortions

This study finds that adolescents with specific learning disorders show reduced face working memory precision and systematic bias toward neutrality when recalling emotionally valenced faces, with dyscalculia showing the greatest impairment.

Neuronal processing of facial expressions in the primate superior colliculus

The paper identifies two distinct neuron groups in the primate superior colliculus with different latency responses to facial expressions of threat and fear.

Configural and featural processing, and their role in the face network

The paper investigates configural and featural processing in face recognition using fMRI, finding distinct neural bases and connectivity patterns for each processing type.

Hyperface: a naturalistic fMRI dataset for investigating human face processing

Hyperface provides a naturalistic fMRI dataset for studying human face processing under ecologically valid conditions and enables benchmarking computational models against human brain responses.

Task-optimized neural networks reveal distinct contributions of specialized and broader visual learning to neural representations of face familiarity

The paper uses task-optimized neural networks to compare how face and object recognition models align with neural activity in visual cortex during face familiarity processing.

The Role of Visual Imagery in Face Recognition and Confidence Revisited: New Evidence from Aphantasia, Sampling Context Effects, and a Meta-Analysis

This study investigates the role of visual imagery in face recognition using aphantasia and finds that typical imagers outperform aphantasics under high demand, with lower confidence reported by aphantasics.

Facial Expressions of Emotion are Infrequent in Toddlers' and Caregivers' Egocentric Views: An Ecological Study

This study quantifies emotional facial expressions in toddlers' and caregivers' egocentric views, finding sparse and biased positive expressions in toddlers' perspectives.

What makes an angry face uncomfortable? Distinct contributions of facial expression, interpersonal distance, facial stimulus type, and gaze in virtual reality

The paper investigates factors contributing to discomfort from angry faces in virtual reality, finding that distance and gaze direction significantly influence discomfort beyond perceived anger.

fNIRS reveals that live social interactions and visual realism influence neural responses

This study uses fNIRS to show that live social interactions and visual realism of social partners affect neural responses in brain regions related to theory of mind.

Flexible predictive processing during face perception

This study investigates how sex/gender stereotypes influence face perception by manipulating expectations during emotion and sex categorization tasks, revealing task-dependent effects on neural coding and behavior.

Concurrent category-selective neural activity across the ventral occipito-temporal cortex supports a non-hierarchical view of human visual recognition

The paper challenges the hierarchical model of visual recognition by showing concurrent category-selective neural activity across the ventral occipito-temporal cortex.

Behavioral and ERP Markers of Emotion Recognition: Comparing Embodied, Facial, and Emoji Stimuli

The paper compares emotion recognition across human faces, emoji faces, and stick figures using behavioral and EEG measures, finding emoji faces are most accurate and fastest, while stick figures show stronger early emotional processing.

The Influence of Spatial Frequencies, Orientation and Familiarity on Face Stimuli Integration

This paper investigates how spatial frequency and orientation affect face recognition, finding that holistic processing depends on task and familiarity, challenging the foundational role of low spatial frequency information.

STEMorph: A Set of Morphed Emotional Face Stimuli from Angry to Happy Derived from NimStim

STEMorph creates a validated set of morphed emotional faces from angry to happy to study emotion recognition biases, showing strong correlation between morph levels and perceived emotion intensity.

Enhanced neural encoding of individual exemplars in the Super-Recogniser brain is specific to faces

The paper finds that Super-Recognisers show enhanced neural encoding of individual face identities but not other categories like dogs, cars, or houses.

Expectation Shapes Neural Preparation for AI-generated and Real Image Processing: Evidence from EEG

The paper investigates how expectations about AI-generated images affect neural preparation, finding lower alpha power when expecting fake faces compared to real ones.