The prevalence of facial recognition problems appears to have been underestimated in the normal population. Prosopagnosia or """"""""face blindness"""""""" (whether congenital or acquired) causes untold embarrassment and often leads to social isolation. Recent imaging studies in normals have suggested that an area within the fusiform gyrus of the human cortex is active when faces are present, and non-invasive electrophysiological studies have now demonstrated that this activation begins around 140 ms over posterior cortex after presentation of a face (N170 component of the scalp ERP). The amplitude of the N170 is usually larger over the right than left hemisphere for normal upright faces and has been argued to reflect configural processing of faces. There has been some evidence that the response to faces can be modulated by attention. Attention to the configural properties produces more modulation in the right fusiform while attention to parts produces more modulation in the left, reminiscent of the evidence for other global/local hemispheric differences. The studies proposed here concern attention and face perception, including the role of awareness and automaticity (i.e., testing our hypothesis for mandatory priority of faces), some which address questions concerning the level of processing at which faces enter awareness (i.e., testing our hypothesis that all else being equal, attention is drawn to faces reflexively), and others that address the role of executive or top down mechanisms in processing faces under divided and focused conditions. These issues are addressed by combining neuropsychological, cognitive and electrophysiological methods to examine face processing in normal participants, in individuals who suffer from congenital prosopagnosia and in patients with attentional deficits that affect awareness (i.e., hemi-inattention). There are several unique strengths to this proposal: 1) collaboration between the PI and Co-PI with their respective expertise in cognitive neuropsychology of attention and electrophysiology of face perception; 2) the relatively large cohort of congenital prosopagnosic subjects (2 in Israel & 6 in California), some who have already been tested with the same paradigms across our two laboratories; 3) the opportunity for translational training for graduate and post doctoral students who will work on the proposed projects.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01MH064458-03
Application #
6931240
Study Section
Biobehavioral and Behavioral Processes 3 (BBBP)
Program Officer
Kurtzman, Howard S
Project Start
2003-09-25
Project End
2007-07-31
Budget Start
2005-08-01
Budget End
2006-07-31
Support Year
3
Fiscal Year
2005
Total Cost
$175,770
Indirect Cost
Name
East Bay Institute for Research and Education
Department
Type
DUNS #
792678179
City
Martinez
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
94553
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Harel, Assaf; Bentin, Shlomo (2013) Are all types of expertise created equal? Car experts use different spatial frequency scales for subordinate categorization of cars and faces. PLoS One 8:e67024
Sun, Gang; Song, Luping; Bentin, Shlomo et al. (2013) Visual search for faces by race: a cross-race study. Vision Res 89:39-46
Gilaie-Dotan, Sharon; Hahamy-Dubossarsky, Avital; Nir, Yuval et al. (2013) Resting state functional connectivity reflects abnormal task-activated patterns in a developmental object agnosic. Neuroimage 70:189-98
Gao, Zaifeng; Goldstein, Abraham; Harpaz, Yuval et al. (2013) A magnetoencephalographic study of face processing: M170, gamma-band oscillations and source localization. Hum Brain Mapp 34:1783-95
Gilaie-Dotan, Sharon; Harel, Assaf; Bentin, Shlomo et al. (2012) Neuroanatomical correlates of visual car expertise. Neuroimage 62:147-53
Brooks, Joseph L; Gilaie-Dotan, Sharon; Rees, Geraint et al. (2012) Preserved local but disrupted contextual figure-ground influences in an individual with abnormal function of intermediate visual areas. Neuropsychologia 50:1393-407
Daniel, Sharon; Bentin, Shlomo (2012) Age-related changes in processing faces from detection to identification: ERP evidence. Neurobiol Aging 33:206.e1-28

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