Righart Ruthger, de Gelder Beatrice
Department of Psychology, Cognitive and Affective Neurosciences Laboratory, Tilburg University, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Cereb Cortex. 2006 Sep;16(9):1249-57. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhj066. Epub 2005 Nov 23.
Electrophysiological and hemodynamic correlates of processing isolated faces have been investigated extensively over the last decade. A question not addressed thus far is whether the visual scene, which normally surrounds a face or a facial expression, has an influence on how the face is processed. Here we investigated this issue by presenting faces in natural contexts and measuring whether the emotional content of the scene influences processing of a facial expression. Event-related potentials were recorded to faces (fearful/neutral) embedded in scene contexts (fearful/neutral) while participants performed an orientation-decision task (face upright or inverted). Two additional experiments were run, one to examine the effects of context that occur without a face and the other to evaluate the effects of faces isolated from contexts. Faces without any context showed the largest N170 amplitudes. The presence of a face in a fearful context enhances the N170 amplitude over a face in neutral contexts, an effect that is strongest for fearful faces on left occipito-temporal sites. This N170 effect, and the corresponding topographic distribution, was not found for contexts-only, indicating that the increased N170 amplitude results from the combination of face and fearful context. These findings suggest that the context in which a face appears may influence how it is encoded.
在过去十年中，人们对孤立面孔加工的电生理和血流动力学相关性进行了广泛研究。到目前为止，一个尚未解决的问题是，通常围绕面部或面部表情的视觉场景是否会对面部的加工方式产生影响。在这里，我们通过在自然情境中呈现面孔并测量场景的情感内容是否会影响面部表情的加工来研究这个问题。在参与者执行方向判断任务（面孔 upright 或 inverted）时，记录嵌入场景情境（恐惧/中性）中的面孔（恐惧/中性）的事件相关电位。还进行了另外两个实验，一个实验研究没有面孔时情境的影响，另一个实验评估与情境分离的面孔的影响。没有任何情境的面孔显示出最大的 N170 波幅。在恐惧情境中出现面孔会比在中性情境中出现面孔时增强 N170 波幅，这种效应在左侧枕颞部位对恐惧面孔最为明显。仅情境条件下未发现这种 N170 效应及相应的地形分布，这表明 N170 波幅增加是面孔和恐惧情境共同作用的结果。这些发现表明，面孔出现的情境可能会影响其编码方式。
