It’s who, not what that matters: personal relevance and early face processing

Bayer, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4521-733X, Johnstone, T. and Dziobek, I. (2023) It’s who, not what that matters: personal relevance and early face processing. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 18 (1). nsad021. ISSN 1749-5024 doi: 10.1093/scan/nsad021

Abstract/Summary

The faces of our friends and loved ones are among the most pervasive and important social stimuli we encounter in our everyday lives. We employed EEG to investigated the time line of personally relevant face processing and potential interactions with emotional facial expressions by presenting female participants with photographs of their romantic partner, a close friend, and a stranger, displaying fearful, happy and neutral facial expressions. Our results revealed elevated activity to the partner’s face from 100 ms after stimulus onset as evident in increased amplitudes of P1, EPN, P3 and LPC components, while there were no effects of emotional expressions, and no interactions. Our findings indicate the prominent role of personal relevance in face processing; the time course of effects further suggests that it might not rely solely on the core face processing network, but might start even before the stage of structural face encoding. Our results suggest a new direction of research in which face processing models should be expanded to adequately capture the dynamics of the processing of real-life, personally relevant faces.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/111811
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Neuroscience
Uncontrolled Keywords	Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, General Medicine
Publisher	Oxford University Press (OUP)
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