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Cited by 450Face Recognition and PerceptionFace recognition and analysisEvolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior

Face Perception

Open access
Yovel, Galit, Kanwisher, Nancy·2004·Neuron
DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2004.11.018
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Abstract

Evidence that face perception is mediated by special cognitive and neural mechanisms comes from fMRI studies of the fusiform face area (FFA) and behavioral studies of the face inversion effect. Here, we used these two methods to ask whether face perception mechanisms are stimulus specific, process specific, or both. Subjects discriminated pairs of upright or inverted faces or house stimuli that differed in either the spatial distance among parts (configuration) or the shape of the parts. The FFA showed a much higher response to faces than to houses, but no preference for the configuration task over the part task. Similarly, the behavioral inversion effect was as large in the part task as the configuration task for faces, but absent in both part and configuration tasks for houses. These findings indicate that face perception mechanisms are not process specific for parts or configuration but are domain specific for face stimuli per se.

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  • Houses work well as nonfacial controls because their spatial and visual properties resemble those of faces.

    “Houses serve as an appropriate control stimuli for faces because they share similar spatial and visual features (48).”

    From Oxytocin enhances brain reward system responses in men viewing the face of their female partner (2013) · cites this paper as [48]

    The FFA section (p. 1) describes closely matched face and house discrimination tasks involving spatial relations and part shapes, and the Domain Specificity discussion (p. 7) says the authors matched the house tasks to the face tasks as closely as possible. This supports using houses as nonface controls, but the paper does not establish that houses and faces themselves share similar spatial and visual properties; it describes matched tasks and manipulations instead. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. Kanwisher, N.G. (2003). The ventral visual object pathway in humans: Evidence from fMRI. In The Visual Neurosciences, L. Chalupa and J. Werner, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 1179-1189.
  2. Malcom, G., Leung, C., and Barton, J.J.S. (2005). Regional salience and the inversion effect for faces: differential effects for feature shape, spatial relations, and external contour. Perception, in press.
  3. Yovel, G., Paller, K.A., and Levy, J. (2005). A whole face equals the sum of its halves. Interactive processing in face perception. Vis. Cogn., in press.

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Authors
Yovel, G., & Kanwisher, N.
Affiliations
McGovern Institute for Brain Research (US)
Corresponding author
Yovel, Galit
ORCID
Venue
Neuron
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2004-12
Volume
44
Issue
5
Pages
889-898
ISSN
0896-6273 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/j.neuron.2004.11.018
OpenAlex
W2014514119
Cited by
450
References
49
Citations by year
2026: 4 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 13 · 2020: 14 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 15 · 2017: 17 · 2016: 24 · 2015: 15 · 2014: 23 · 2013: 34 · 2012: 27
FWCI
13.43
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Neuron (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • National Institute of Mental Health (66696)
  • National Eye Institute (EY13455)
  • National Center for Research Resources (R01 RR16594-01A1, P41-RR14075, BIRN002)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Face recognition and analysis
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
Keywords
face perception, fusiform face area, face inversion effect, domain specificity, face configuration, stimulus specificity
MeSH terms
Brain, Face, Housing, Humans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Pattern Recognition, Visual

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