Familiarity Facilitates Face Processing Through Early Theta-Band Oscillation and Top-Down Modulation

Humans can accurately recognize familiar faces in a few hundred milliseconds, but the underlying neural mechanism remains unclear. Here we recorded intracranial electrophysiological signals from ventral temporal cortex (VTC), superior/middle temporal cortex (STC/MTC) and medial temporal lobe (MTL) in 19 epilepsy patients while they viewed faces of famous people and strangers as well as common objects. In VTC and STC/MTC, familiarity-sensitive responses emerged about 70 ms after initial face-selective responses, suggesting that familiarity enhances face representations in temporal lobe in a top-down manner. However, compared to unfamiliar faces, famous faces induced stronger theta-phase coupling between anterior STC/MTC and MTL before initial face-selective responses in temporal cortex. The interaction between these two regions was increased by familiarity in both direction. These findings therefore imply that familiarity enhances face processing via early theta-band bidirectional interactions between anterior STC/MTC and MTL, together with topdown modulation in local face-selective response.

Keywords: face, familiarity, top-down, theta, iEEG

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Fan, Xiaoxu and Guo, Qiang and Zhang, Xinxin and Fei, Lingxia and He, Sheng and Weng, Xuchu, Familiarity Facilitates Face Processing Through Early Theta-Band Oscillation and Top-Down Modulation. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4012176 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4012176

This version of the paper has not been formally peer reviewed.