title: Priming visual face-processing mechanisms: electrophysiological evidence.
abstract: Accumulated evidence from electrophysiology and neuroimaging suggests that face perception involves extrastriate visual mechanisms specialized in processing physiognomic features and building a perceptual representation that is categorically distinct and can be identified by face-recognition units. In the present experiment, we recorded event-related brain potentials in order to explore possible contextual influences on the activity of this perceptual mechanism. Subjects werefirst exposed to pairs of small shapes, which did not elicit any face-specific brain activity. The same stimuli, however, elicitedface-specific brain activity after subjects saw them embedded in schematic faces, which probably primed the subjects to interpret the shapes as schematic eyes. No face-specific activity was observed when objects rather than faces were used to form the context. We conclude that the activity of face-specific extrastriate perceptual mechanisms can be modulated by contextual constraints that determine the significance of the visual input.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. msbentin@mscc.huji.ac.il
authors.forename: Shlomo
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bentin
authors.forename: Noam
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Sagiv
authors.forename: Axel
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mecklinger
authors.forename: Angela
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Friederici
authors.forename: Yves D
authors.initials: YD
authors.lastname: von Cramon
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology*; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D014795:Visual Pathways / Q000502:physiology