Perception and Processing of Faces in the Human Brain Is Tuned to Typical Feature Locations.
Faces are salient social stimuli whose features attract a stereotypical pattern of fixations. The implications of this gaze behavior for perception and brain activity are largely unknown. Here, we characterize and quantify a retinotopic bias implied by typical gaze behavior toward faces, which leads to eyes and mouth appearing most often in the upper and lower visual field, respectively. We found that the adult human visual system is tuned to these contingencies. In two recognition experiments, recognition performance for isolated face parts was better when they were presented at typical, rather than reversed, visual field locations. The recognition cost of reversed locations was equal to ∼60% of that for whole face inversion in the same sample. Similarly, an fMRI experiment showed that patterns of activity evoked by eye and mouth stimuli in the right inferior occipital gyrus could be separated with significantly higher accuracy when these features were presented at typical, rather than reversed, visual field locations. Our findings demonstrate that human face perception is determined not only by the local position of features within a face context, but by whether features appear at the typical retinotopic location given normal gaze behavior. Such location sensitivity may reflect fine-tuning of category-specific visual processing to retinal input statistics. Our findings further suggest that retinotopic heterogeneity might play a role for face inversion effects and for the understanding of conditions affecting gaze behavior toward faces, such as autism spectrum disorders and congenital prosopagnosia.



Faces attract our attention and trigger stereotypical patterns of visual fixations, concentrating on inner features, like eyes and mouth. Here we show that the visual system represents face features better when they are shown at retinal positions where they typically fall during natural vision. When facial features were shown at typical (rather than reversed) visual field locations, they were discriminated better by humans and could be decoded with higher accuracy from brain activity patterns in the right occipital face area. This suggests that brain representations of face features do not cover the visual field uniformly. It may help us understand the well-known face-inversion effect and conditions affecting gaze behavior toward faces, such as prosopagnosia and autism spectrum disorders.
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, Experimental Psychology, and benjamin.haas.09@ucl.ac.uk.
Benjamin
0000-0003-1722-7757
B
de Haas
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental Psychology, and.
D Samuel
DS
Schwarzkopf
Institute of Child Health, University College London, London WC1H 0AP, United Kingdom, Oxford University Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain, Oxford OX3 9DU, United Kingdom.
Ivan
0000-0003-2815-2666
I
Alvarez
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging.
Rebecca P
0000-0003-1228-1244
RP
Lawson
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge CB2 7EF, United Kingdom, and Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, Aalto University, Espoo FI-00076, Finland.
Linda
0000-0002-7688-1882
L
Henriksson
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge CB2 7EF, United Kingdom, and.
Nikolaus
N
Kriegeskorte
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging.
Geraint
0000-0002-9623-7007
G
Rees
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009778:Occipital Lobe / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000502:physiology*; D010100:Oxygen / Q000097:blood; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
D010100:Oxygen
decoding; fMRI; face perception; gaze behavior; occipital face area; retinotopy