Journal
CORTEX
Volume 53, Issue -, Pages 60-77Publisher
ELSEVIER MASSON
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2014.01.013
Keywords
Face processing; fMRI; Fusiform face area; Top-down processing; Face pareidolia
Funding
- National Basic Research Program of China [2011CB707700]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [81227901, 61231004, 61375110, 30970771, 60910006, 31028010, 30970769, 81000640]
- Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2013JBZ014, 2011JBM226]
- NIH [R01HD046526, R01HD060595]
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Face pareidolia is the illusory perception of non-existent faces. The present study, for the first time, contrasted behavioral and neural responses of face pareidolia with those of letter pareidolia to explore face-specific behavioral and neural responses during illusory face processing. Participants were shown pure-noise images but were led to believe that 50% of them contained either faces or letters; they reported seeing faces or letters illusorily 34% and 38% of the time, respectively. The right fusiform face area (rFFA) showed a specific response when participants saw faces as opposed to letters in the pure-noise images. Behavioral responses during face pareidolia produced a classification image (CI) that resembled a face, whereas those during letter pareidolia produced a CI that was letter-like. Further, the extent to which such behavioral CIs resembled faces was directly related to the level of face-specific activations in the rFFA. This finding suggests that the rFFA plays a specific role not only in processing of real faces but also in illusory face perception, perhaps serving to facilitate the interaction between bottom-up information from the primary visual cortex and top-down signals from the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Whole brain analyses revealed a network specialized in face pareidolia, including both the frontal and occipitotemporal regions. Our findings suggest that human face processing has a strong top-down component whereby sensory input with even the slightest suggestion of a face can result in the interpretation of a face. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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