Negrini Marcello, Brkić Diandra, Pizzamiglio Sara, Premoli Isabella, Rivolta Davide
School of Psychology, University of East LondonLondon, UK; Department of Economics (AE1), School of Business and Economics, Maastricht UniversityMaastricht, Netherlands.
School of Psychology, University of East LondonLondon, UK; Aston Brain Centre, School of Life and Health Sciences, Aston UniversityBirmingham, UK.
Front Psychol. 2017 Mar 13;8:333. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00333. eCollection 2017.
The peculiar ability of humans to recognize hundreds of faces at a glance has been attributed to face-specific perceptual mechanisms known as holistic processing. Holistic processing includes the ability to discriminate individual facial features (i.e., featural processing) and their spatial relationships (i.e., spacing processing). Here, we aimed to characterize the spatio-temporal dynamics of featural- and spacing-processing of faces and objects. Nineteen healthy volunteers completed a newly created perceptual discrimination task for faces and objects (i.e., the "University of East London Face Task") while their brain activity was recorded with a high-density (128 electrodes) electroencephalogram. Our results showed that early event related potentials at around 100 ms post-stimulus onset (i.e., P100) are sensitive to both facial features and spacing between the features. Spacing and features discriminability for objects occurred at circa 200 ms post-stimulus onset (P200). These findings indicate the existence of neurophysiological correlates of spacing vs. features processing in both face and objects, and demonstrate faster brain processing for faces.
人类能够一眼识别数百张面孔的独特能力，归因于一种被称为整体加工的面部特异性感知机制。整体加工包括区分个体面部特征（即特征加工）及其空间关系（即间距加工）的能力。在此，我们旨在描述面部和物体的特征加工与间距加工的时空动态。19名健康志愿者完成了一项新创建的针对面部和物体的感知辨别任务（即“东伦敦大学面部任务”），同时用高密度（128个电极）脑电图记录他们的大脑活动。我们的结果表明，刺激开始后约100毫秒（即P100）的早期事件相关电位对面部特征和特征之间的间距均敏感。物体的间距和特征辨别能力出现在刺激开始后约200毫秒（P200）。这些发现表明，在面部和物体中均存在间距与特征加工的神经生理相关性，并证明大脑对面部的加工更快。
