Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Person Recognition

How do we recognize people we know? Successful recognition can be achieved using identity information from faces, bodies, and from the natural “biological motions” of a person. We study how people make use of this diverse information to recognize someone. Behaviorally, we examine the spatiotemporal course of recognition over variable distances. We also examine the neural correlates of recognition using functional neuroimaging (fMRI). We measure how brain regions that respond to faces, bodies, and biological motion respond to familiar and unfamiliar people when we see people in natural viewing environments — for example, when a person approaches us from a distance, or when we see them engaged in conversation. For fMRI analysis, we employ multivariate analyses, (e.g., multi-voxel pattern analysis and pattern classification techniques) to find where in the brain a person is recognized as “familiar.” This work makes use of the pattern of neural activity that specifies a percept.

Hahn, C. A., O’Toole, A.J., Phillips, P. J. (2016). Dissecting the time course of person recognition in natural viewing environments. British Journal of Psychology. 107(1), 117-134. doi: 10.1111/bjop.12125

Natu, V., & O’Toole, A. J. (2015). Spatiotemporal changes in neural response patterns to faces varying in visual familiarity. NeuroImage, 108, 151?159. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.12.027

O’Toole, A. J., Natu, V., An, X., Rice, A., Ryland, J., Phillips, J., & Phillips, P. J. (2014). The neural representation of faces and bodies in motion and at rest. NeuroImage, 91, 1?11. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.01.038

Rice, A., Phillips, P. J., Natu, V., An, X., & O’Toole, A. J. (2013). Unaware person recognition from the body when face identification fails. Psychological Science, 24(11), 2235-2243. doi:10.1177/ 0956797613492986

Rice, A., Phillips, P. J., & O’Toole, A. J. (2013). The role of the face and body in unfamiliar person identification. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 27(6), 761-768. doi:10.1002/acp.2969

Natu, V., Raboy, D., & O’Toole, A. J. (2011). Neural correlates of own- and other-race face perception: spatial and temporal response differences. NeuroImage, 54(3), 2547-55. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.10.006

O’Toole, A. J., Phillips, P. J., Weimer, S., Roark, D. A., Ayyad, J., Barwick, R., & Dunlop, J. (2011). Recognizing people from dynamic and static faces and bodies: Dissecting identity with a fusion approach. Vision Research, 51(1), 74-83. doi:10.1016/j.visres.2010.09.035

Natu, V. S., Jiang, F. Narvekar, A., Keshvari, S., Blanz, V. & O’Toole, A. J. (2010). Dissociable neural patterns of facial identity across changes in viewpoint. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(7), 1570-1582.

Links to our other projects

Perception and Memory for Human Faces
Face Recognition Comparisons Between Humans and Machines
Functional Neuroimaging of High Level Visual Processing of Human Faces
Perceptual Relationships Between Body Shape and Language
Analyzing Face Recognition Algorithms
Understanding the Performance of Forensic Facial Identification Experts