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1. Superior Detection of Faces in Male Infants at 2 Months

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13543  

   Maylott, Sarah_E; Sansone, Jilian_R; Jakobsen, Krisztina_V; Simpson, Elizabeth_A (January 2021, Child Development)

   Females generally attend more to social information than males; however, little is known about the early development of these sex differences. With eye tracking, 2‐month olds’ (N = 101; 44 females) social orienting to faces was measured within four‐item image arrays. Infants were more likely to detect human faces compared to objects, suggesting a functional face detection system. Unexpectedly, males looked longer at human faces than females, and only males looked faster and longer at human faces compared to objects. Females, in contrast, looked less at human faces relative to animal faces and objects, appearing socially disinterested. Notably, this is the first report of a male face detection advantage at any age. These findings suggest a unique stage in early infant social development. 

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2. Developmental emergence of holistic processing in word recognition

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13372  

   Nischal, Roshni Pushpa; Behrmann, Marlene (January 2023, Developmental Science)

   Holistic processing (HP) of faces refers to the obligatory, simultaneous processing of the parts and their relations, and it emerges over the course of development. HP is manifest in a decrement in the perception of inverted versus upright faces and a reduction in face processing ability when the relations between parts are perturbed. Here, adopting the HP framework for faces, we examined the developmental emergence of HP in another domain for which human adults have expertise, namely, visual word processing. Children, adolescents, and adults performed a lexical decision task and we used two established signatures of HP for faces: the advantage in perception of upright over inverted words and nonwords and the reduced sensitivity to increasing parts (word length). Relative to the other groups, children showed less of an advantage for upright versus inverted trials and lexical decision was more affected by increasing word length. Performance on these HP indices was strongly associated with age and with reading proficiency. Also, the emergence of HP for word perception was not simply a result of improved visual perception over the course of development as no group differences were observed on an object decision task. These results reveal the developmental emergence of HP for orthographic input, and reflect a further instance of experience-dependent tuning of visual perception. These results also add to existing findings on the commonalities of mechanisms of word and face recognition. 

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3. General and own-species attentional face biases

   https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-020-02132-w  

   Jakobsen, Krisztina V.; White, Cassidy; Simpson, Elizabeth A. (October 2020, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics)

   null (Ed.)

   Humans demonstrate enhanced processing of human faces compared with animal faces, known as own-species bias. This bias is important for identifying people who may cause harm, as well as for recognizing friends and kin. However, growing evidence also indicates a more general face bias. Faces have high evolutionary importance beyond conspecific interactions, as they aid in detecting predators and prey. Few studies have explored the interaction of these biases together. In three experiments, we explored processing of human and animal faces, compared with each other and to nonface objects, which allowed us to examine both own-species and broader face biases. We used a dot-probe paradigm to examine human adults’ covert attentional biases for task-irrelevant human faces, animal faces, and objects. We replicated the own-species attentional bias for human faces relative to animal faces. We also found an attentional bias for animal faces relative to objects, consistent with the proposal that faces broadly receive privileged processing. Our findings suggest that humans may be attracted to a broad class of faces. Further, we found that while participants rapidly attended to human faces across all cue display durations, they attended to animal faces only when they had sufficient time to process them. Our findings reveal that the dot-probe paradigm is sensitive for capturing both own-species and more general face biases, and that each has a different attentional signature, possibly reflecting their unique but overlapping evolutionary importance. 

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4. Using population receptive field models to elucidate spatial integration in high-level visual cortex

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.32470/CCN.2019.1178-0  

   Poltoratski, Sonia Kay (September 2019, 2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, 13-16 September 2019, Berlin, Germany)

   While spatial information and biases have been consistently reported in high-level face regions, the functional contribution of this information toward face recognition behavior is unclear. Here, we propose that spatial integration of information plays a critical role in a hallmark phenomenon of face perception: holistic processing, or the tendency to process all features of a face concurrently rather than independently. We sought to gain insight into the neural basis of face recognition behavior by using a voxelwise encoding model of spatial selectivity to characterize the human face network using both typical face stimuli, and stimuli thought to disrupt normal face perception. We mapped population receptive fields (pRFs) using 3T fMRI in 6 participants using upright as well as inverted faces, which are thought to disrupt holistic processing. Compared to upright faces, inverted faces yielded substantial differences in measured pRF size, position, and amplitude. Further, these differences increased in magnitude along the face network hierarchy, from IOG- to pFus- and mFus-faces. These data suggest that pRFs in high-level regions reflect complex stimulus- dependent neural computations that underlie variations in recognition performance. 

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5. Holistic face recognition is an emergent phenomenon of spatial processing in face-selective regions

   https://doi.org/0.1038/s41467-021-24806-1  

   Poltoratski, Sonia Kay (August 2021, Nature communications)

   Spatial processing by receptive fields is a core property of the visual system. However, it is unknown how spatial processing in high-level regions contributes to recognition behavior. As face inversion is thought to disrupt typical holistic processing of information in faces, we mapped population receptive fields (pRFs) with upright and inverted faces in the human visual system. Here we show that in face-selective regions, but not primary visual cortex, pRFs and overall visual field coverage are smaller and shifted downward in response to face inversion. From these measurements, we successfully predict the relative behavioral detriment of face inversion at different positions in the visual field. This correspondence between neural measurements and behavior demonstrates how spatial processing in face-selective regions may enable holistic perception. These results not only show that spatial processing in high-level visual regions is dynamically used towards recognition, but also suggest a powerful approach for bridging neural computations by receptive fields to behavior. 

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