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Understanding individual face discrimination by means of fast periodic visual stimulation

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Abstract

This paper reviews a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) approach developed recently to make significant progress in understanding visual discrimination of individual faces. Displaying pictures of faces at a periodic frequency rate leads to a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) response in the human electroencephalogram, at the exact frequency of stimulation, a so-called steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP, Regan in Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol 20:238–248, 1966). For fast periodic frequency rates, i.e., between 3 and 9 Hz, this response is reduced if the exact same face identity is repeated compared to the presentation of different face identities, the largest difference being observed over the right occipito-temporal cortex. A 6-Hz stimulation rate (cycle duration of ~170 ms) provides the largest difference between different and repeated faces, as also evidenced in face-selective areas of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex in functional magnetic resonance imaging. This high-level discrimination response is reduced following inversion and contrast-reversal of the faces and can be isolated without subtraction thanks to a fast periodic oddball paradigm. Overall, FPVS provides a response that is objective (i.e., at an experimentally defined frequency), implicit, has a high SNR and is directly quantifiable in a short amount of time. Although the approach is particularly appealing for understanding face perception, it can be generalized to study visual discrimination of complex visual patterns such as objects and visual scenes. The advantages of the approach make it also particularly well-suited to investigate these functions in populations who cannot provide overt behavioral responses and can only be tested for short durations, such as infants, young children and clinical populations.

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Notes

  1. In some SSVEP studies of low-level visual stimuli, an attribute of the stimulus can also change periodically, although the changes are limited to two states or smaller increasing or decreasing steps. For instance, a leftward motion alternates periodically with a rightward motion (Tyler and Kaitz 1977), or the phase of a sinusoidal grating reverses periodically (e.g., Atkinson et al. 1979). In the sweep SSVEP paradigm (Regan 1973), the same stimulus (e.g., a checkerboard) is presented at a periodic rate, but it increases or decreases progressively at every cycle according to a low-level property such as contrast, spatial frequency or orientation (e.g., Norcia and Tyler 1985; see Almoqbel et al. 2008 for a review).

  2. The present approach should also be distinguished from the visually evoked spread spectrum response potential (VESPA, Lalor et al. 2006), in which the dimension of interest (usually luminance) changes according to a large number of known values, at fast rates (i.e., up to half the periodic rate of the stimulation monitor, usually 60 Hz). For luminance changes at least, this latter approach also provides a higher SNR than standard ERP measures (Lalor et al. 2006), although not in proportions that are comparable to the SNR obtained during periodic visual stimulation. However, by definition, the VESPA stimulation is not periodic, and the analysis is performed in the time-domain to extract the visual system’s impulse response, not in the frequency domain. The response of interest requires a strict modelization of the change of the property of interest (i.e., the stimulus luminance waveform), and to my knowledge, has not been applied to high-level visual properties (see Lalor et al. 2006, 2012).

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Belgian National Foundation for Scientific Research (FNRS) and an ERC Grant (facessvep 284025).

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Rossion, B. Understanding individual face discrimination by means of fast periodic visual stimulation. Exp Brain Res 232, 1599–1621 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-014-3934-9

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