Lally Clare, Lavan Nadine, Garrido Lucia, Tsantani Maria, McGettigan Carolyn
University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom.
Imaging Neurosci (Camb). 2023 Aug 21;1. doi: 10.1162/imag_a_00009. eCollection 2023.
Recognising other people in naturalistic settings relies on differentiating between individuals ("telling apart"), as well as generalising across within-person variability ("telling together"; Burton, 2013; Lavan, Burston, & Garrido, 2019; Lavan, Burton, et al., 2019). However, previous neuroscientific investigations of face and voice recognition have tended to measure identity-related responses and representations using tightly controlled stimuli, thus under sampling the naturalistic variability encountered in everyday life. In this study, we tested whether cortical regions previously implicated in processing faces and voices represent identities during naturalistic and task-free stimulation. Representational similarity analyses were conducted on functional MRI datasets collected while human participants watched feature-length movies. Identity representations-defined as similar response patterns to variable instances of the same person ("telling together"), and dissimilar patterns in response to different people ("telling apart")-were observed in established face and voice processing areas, across two independent participant groups viewing different sets of identities. We also explored contributions of face versus voice information to identity representations, finding more widespread preferential sensitivity to faces. We thus characterise how the brain represents identities in the real world, for the first-time accounting for both "telling people together" and "telling people apart." Despite substantial differences to previous experimental research, our findings align with previous work, showing that similar brain areas are engaged in the representation of identities under experimental and naturalistic exposure.
在自然场景中识别他人既依赖于区分个体（“区分开来”），也依赖于在个体内部变异性上进行概括（“综合起来识别”；伯顿，2013年；拉万、伯斯顿和加里多，2019年；拉万、伯顿等人，2019年）。然而，以往对面部和语音识别的神经科学研究倾向于使用严格控制的刺激来测量与身份相关的反应和表征，因此对日常生活中遇到的自然变异性采样不足。在本研究中，我们测试了先前涉及处理面部和语音的皮层区域在自然和无任务刺激期间是否表征身份。对人类参与者观看故事片时收集的功能磁共振成像数据集进行了表征相似性分析。在两个观看不同身份集的独立参与者组中，在既定的面部和语音处理区域观察到了身份表征，即对同一个人的不同实例的相似反应模式（“综合起来识别”），以及对不同人的不同反应模式（“区分开来”）。我们还探讨了面部信息与语音信息对身份表征的贡献，发现对面部的优先敏感性更为广泛。因此，我们首次描述了大脑在现实世界中如何表征身份，同时考虑了“综合起来识别他人”和“区分他人”。尽管与之前的实验研究存在很大差异，但我们的研究结果与之前的工作一致，表明在实验和自然暴露条件下，相似的脑区参与了身份表征。
