The neural dynamics of familiar face recognition

Abstract In real-life situations, the appearance of a person’s face can vary substantially across different encounters, making face recognition a challenging task for the visual system. Recent fMRI decoding studies have suggested that face recognition is supported by identity representations located in regions of the occipito-temporal cortex. Here, we used EEG to elucidate the temporal emergence of these representations. Human participants (both sexes) viewed a set of highly variable face images of four highly familiar celebrities (two male, two female), while performing an orthogonal task. Univariate analyses of event-related EEG responses revealed a pronounced differentiation between male and female faces, but not between identities of the same sex. Using multivariate representational similarity analysis, we observed a gradual emergence of face identity representations, with an increasing degree of invariance. Face identity information emerged rapidly, starting shortly after 100ms from stimulus onset. From 400ms after onset and predominantly in the right hemisphere, identity representations showed two invariance properties: (1) they equally discriminated identities of opposite sexes and of the same sex, and (2) they were tolerant to image-based variations. These invariant representations may be a crucial prerequisite for successful face recognition in everyday situations, where the appearance of a familiar person can vary drastically. Significance Statement Recognizing the face of a friend on the street is a task we effortlessly perform in our everyday lives. However, the necessary visual processing underlying familiar face recognition is highly complex. As the appearance of a given person varies drastically between encounters, for example across viewpoints or emotional expressions, the brain needs to extract identity information that is invariant to such changes. Using multivariate analyses of EEG data, we characterize how invariant representations of face identity emerge gradually over time. After 400ms of processing, cortical representations reliably differentiated two similar identities (e.g., two famous male actors), even across a set of highly variable images. These representations may support face recognition under challenging real-life conditions.