User:Dustin Runzo/sandbox: face perception 2

Face perception:

-add background information of face recognition relating to face perception

-add to section "in individuals with schizophrenia"

-add information about self-face perception in general

-add information about self-face perception in individuals with schizophrenia

-add to section "in animals"

DRAFT:

Add to Development: For example, newborns (1-3 days) have been shown to be able to recognize faces even when they are rotated up to 45 degrees. When presented with the faces of a white male and a white female, three month old white infants preferred the female face. However, when presented with the faces of an Asian male and an Asian female the infants had no preference. Newborns did not show this preference for white females. This experiment showed that even at only three months of age early life experiences can shape infants' perception of faces, preferring faces that are most similar to their likely primary caregiver.

Add to Adult: Recognizing and perceiving faces are vital abilities needed to coexist in society. Faces can tell things such as identity, mood, age, sex, race, and the direction that someone is looking. Studies based on neuropsychology, behavior, electrophysiology, and neuro-imaging have supported the notion of a specialized mechanism for perceiving faces. Prosopagnosia patients demonstrate neuropsychological support for a specialized face perception mechanism as these people, due to brain damage, have deficits in facial perception, but their cognitive perception of objects remains intact. The face inversion effect provides behavioral support of a specialized mechanism as people tend to have greater deficits in task performance when prompted to react to an inverted face than to an inverted object. Electrophysiological support comes from the finding that the N170 and M170 responses tend to be face-specific. Neuro-imaging studies such as PET and fMRI studies have shown support for a specialized facial processing mechanism as they have identified regions of the fusiform gyrus that have higher activation during face perception tasks than other visual perception tasks.

After several exposures to a face this structural code allows us to recognize that face in different contexts.

Perceiving an inverted human face involves increased activity in the inferior temporal cortex, while perceiving a misaligned face involves increased activity in the occipital cortex. However, none of these results were found when perceiving a dog face, suggesting that this process may be specific to perception of human faces.

Self-face perception
Studies regarding face perception have also looked specifically at self-face perception. One study found that the perception/recognition of one's own face was unaffected by changing contexts, while the perception/recognition of familiar and unfamiliar faces was adversely affected. Another study that focused on older adults found that they had self-face advantage in configural processing but not featural processing.

Add to In individuals with schizophrenia: People with schizophrenia tend to demonstrate a reduced N170 response, atypical face scanning patterns, and a configural processing dysfunction.

There is a positive correlation between self-face recognition and other-face recognition difficulties in individuals with schizophrenia. The degree of schizotypy has also been shown to correlate with self-face difficulties, unusual perception difficulties, and other face recognition difficulties. Schizophrenia patients report more feelings of strangeness when looking in a mirror than do normal controls. Hallucinations, somatic concerns, and depression have all been found to be associated with self-face perception difficulties.

Add to In Animals: Archerfish (distant relatives of humans) were able to differentiate between forty-four different human faces, which supports the theory that there is no need for a neocortex or a history of discerning human faces in order to do so. Pigeons were found to use the same parts of the brain as humans do to distinguish between happy and neutral faces or male and female faces.