Balas Benjamin J, Nelson Charles A, Westerlund Alissa, Vogel-Farley Vanessa, Riggins Tracy, Kuefner Dana
Children's Hospital Boston Boston, MA, USA.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2010 Feb 22;4:1. doi: 10.3389/neuro.09.001.2010. eCollection 2010.
Infant face processing becomes more selective during the first year of life as a function of varying experience with distinct face categories defined by species, race, and age. Given that any individual face belongs to many such categories (e.g. A young Caucasian man's face) we asked how the neural selectivity for one aspect of facial appearance was affected by category membership along another dimension of variability. 6-month-old infants were shown upright and inverted pictures of either their own mother or a stranger while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. We found that the amplitude of the P400 (a face-sensitive ERP component) was only sensitive to the orientation of the mother's face, suggesting that "tuning" of the neural response to faces is realized jointly across multiple dimensions of face appearance.
随着婴儿在生命的第一年里与由物种、种族和年龄所定义的不同面部类别有不同的接触经历，婴儿对面部的加工变得更具选择性。鉴于任何一张个体面孔都属于许多这样的类别（例如，一位年轻白人男性的面孔），我们探究了面部外观某一方面的神经选择性是如何受到另一维度变异性中的类别归属影响的。我们向6个月大的婴儿展示其母亲或一位陌生人的正立和倒立图片，同时记录事件相关电位（ERP）。我们发现，P400（一种对面部敏感的ERP成分）的波幅仅对面部的朝向敏感，这表明对面部的神经反应“调谐”是在面部外观的多个维度上共同实现的。
