Getting to Know Someone: Familiarity, Person Recognition, and Identification in the Human Brain

In our everyday life, we continuously get to know people, dominantly through their faces. Several neuroscientific experiments showed that familiarization changes the behavioral processing and underlying neural representation of faces of others. Here, we propose a model of the process of how we actually get to know someone. First, the purely visual familiarization of unfamiliar faces occurs. Second, the accumulation of associated, nonsensory information refines person representation, and finally, one reaches a stage where the effortless identification of very well-known persons occurs. We offer here an overview of neuroimaging studies, first evaluating how and in what ways the processing of unfamiliar and familiar faces differs and, second, by analyzing the fMRI adaptation and multivariate pattern analysis results we estimate where identity-specific representation is found in the brain. The available neuroimaging data suggest that different aspects of the information emerge gradually as one gets more and more familiar with a person within the same network. We propose a novel model of familiarity and identity processing, where the differential activation of long-term memory and emotion processing areas is essential for correct identification.

Download Full-text

Auditory Long term Memory: Repetition Priming of Voice Recognition

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A ◽

10.1080/713755724 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 50 (3) ◽

pp. 498-517 ◽

Cited By ~ 32

Author(s):

Stefan R. Schweinberger ◽

Anja Herholz ◽

Volker Stief

Keyword(s):

Repetition Priming ◽

Priming Effect ◽

Voice Recognition ◽

Reaction Times ◽

Long Term Memory ◽

Term Memory ◽

Person Recognition ◽

Perceptual Representations

Two experiments examined repetition priming in the recognition of famous voices. In Experiment 1, reaction times for fame decisions to famous voice samples were shorter than in an unprimed condition, when voices were primed by a different voice sample of the same person having been presented in an earlier phase of the experiment. No effect of voice repetition was observed for non-famous voices. In Experiment 2, it was investigated whether this priming effect is voice-specific or whether it is related to post-perceptual processes in person recognition. Recognizing a famous voice was again primed by having earlier heard a different voice sample of that person. Although an earlier exposure to that person's name did not cause any priming, there was some indication of priming following an earlier exposure to that person's face. Finally, earlier exposure to the identical voice sample (as compared to a different voice sample from the same person) caused a considerable bias towards responding “famous”—i.e. performance benefits for famous but costs for nonfamous voices. The findings suggest that (1) repetition priming invoice recognition primarily involves the activation of perceptual representations of voices, and (2) it is important to determine the conditions in which priming causes bias effects that need to be disentangled from performance benefits.

Download Full-text

Individual Sequence Representations in the Medial Temporal Lobe

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn_a_00378 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 25 (7) ◽

pp. 1111-1121 ◽

Cited By ~ 37

Author(s):

Kristjan Kalm ◽

Matthew H. Davis ◽

Dennis Norris

Keyword(s):

Temporal Lobe ◽

Medial Temporal Lobe ◽

Memory Systems ◽

Long Term Memory ◽

Specific Sequence ◽

Level Of Activity ◽

Serial Recall Task ◽

Letter Names ◽

Multivariate Pattern

Much of what we need to remember consists of sequences of stimuli, experiences, or events. Repeated presentation of a specific sequence establishes a more stable long-term memory, as shown by increased recall accuracy over successive trials of an STM task. Here we used fMRI to study the neural mechanisms that underlie sequence learning in the auditory–verbal domain. Specifically, we track the emergence of neural representations of sequences over the course of learning using multivariate pattern analysis. For this purpose, we use a serial recall task, in which participants have to recall overlapping sequences of letter names, with some of those sequences being repeated and hence learned over the course of the experiment. We show that voxels in the hippocampus come to encode the identity of specific repeated sequences although the letter names were common to all sequences in the experiment. These changes could have not been caused by changes in overall level of activity or to fMRI signal-to-noise ratios. Hence, the present results go beyond conventional univariate fMRI methods in showing a critical contribution of medial-temporal lobe memory systems to establishing long-term representations of verbal sequences.

Download Full-text

Tracking Your Mind's Eye during Recollection: Decoding the Long-Term Recall of Short Audiovisual Clips

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn_a_01468 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 50-64

Author(s):

Christelle Larzabal ◽

Nadège Bacon-Macé ◽

Sophie Muratot ◽

Simon J. Thorpe

Keyword(s):

Temporal Dynamics ◽

Long Term Memory ◽

Memory Representation ◽

Gradual Loss ◽

Neural Processes ◽

Consolidation Model ◽

Retention Intervals ◽

Multivariate Pattern ◽

Mind's Eye

Unlike familiarity, recollection involves the ability to reconstruct mentally previous events that results in a strong sense of reliving. According to the reinstatement hypothesis, this specific feature emerges from the reactivation of cortical patterns involved during information exposure. Over time, the retrieval of specific details becomes more difficult, and memories become increasingly supported by familiarity judgments. The multiple trace theory (MTT) explains the gradual loss of episodic details by a transformation in the memory representation, a view that is not shared by the standard consolidation model. In this study, we tested the MTT in light of the reinstatement hypothesis. The temporal dynamics of mental imagery from long-term memory were investigated and tracked over the passage of time. Participant EEG activity was recorded during the recall of short audiovisual clips that had been watched 3 weeks, 1 day, or a few hours beforehand. The recall of the audiovisual clips was assessed using a Remember/Know/New procedure, and snapshots of clips were used as recall cues. The decoding matrices obtained from the multivariate pattern analyses revealed sustained patterns that occurred at long latencies (>500 msec poststimulus onset) that faded away over the retention intervals and that emerged from the same neural processes. Overall, our data provide further evidence toward the MTT and give new insights into the exploration of our “mind's eye.”

Download Full-text

Testing key predictions of the associative account of mirror neurons in humans using multivariate pattern analysis

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x13002434 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 37 (2) ◽

pp. 213-215 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Nikolaas N. Oosterhof ◽

Alison J. Wiggett ◽

Emily S. Cross

Keyword(s):

Mirror Neurons ◽

Pattern Analysis ◽

Multivariate Pattern Analysis ◽

Neuroimaging Data ◽

Associative Account ◽

Multivariate Pattern

AbstractCook et al. overstate the evidence supporting their associative account of mirror neurons in humans: most studies do not address a key property, action-specificity that generalizes across the visual and motor domains. Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) of neuroimaging data can address this concern, and we illustrate how MVPA can be used to test key predictions of their account.

Download Full-text

Memory for events and their spatial context: models and experiments

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rstb.2001.0948 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 356 (1413) ◽

pp. 1493-1503 ◽

Cited By ~ 224

Author(s):

Neil Burgess ◽

Suzanna Becker ◽

John A. King ◽

John O'Keefe

Keyword(s):

Episodic Memory ◽

Spatial Information ◽

Functional Neuroimaging ◽

Real Life ◽

Neural Representation ◽

Spatial Context ◽

Long Term Memory ◽

Long Term Storage ◽

General Aspects

The computational role of the hippocampus in memory has been characterized as: (i) an index to disparate neocortical storage sites; (ii) a time–limited store supporting neocortical long–term memory; and (iii) a content–addressable associative memory. These ideas are reviewed and related to several general aspects of episodic memory, including the differences between episodic, recognition and semantic memory, and whether hippocampal lesions differentially affect recent or remote memories. Some outstanding questions remain, such as: what characterizes episodic retrieval as opposed to other forms of read–out from memory; what triggers the storage of an event memory; and what are the neural mechanisms involved? To address these questions a neural–level model of the medial temporal and parietal roles in retrieval of the spatial context of an event is presented. This model combines the idea that retrieval of the rich context of real–life events is a central characteristic of episodic memory, and the idea that medial temporal allocentric representations are used in long–term storage while parietal egocentric representations are used to imagine, manipulate and re–experience the products of retrieval. The model is consistent with the known neural representation of spatial information in the brain, and provides an explanation for the involvement of Papez's circuit in both the representation of heading direction and in the recollection of episodic information. Two experiments relating to the model are briefly described. A functional neuroimaging study of memory for the spatial context of life–like events in virtual reality provides support for the model's functional localization. A neuropsychological experiment suggests that the hippocampus does store an allocentric representation of spatial locations.

Download Full-text

Stress impacts the fidelity but not strength of emotional memories

10.31234/osf.io/q3tfa ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Maheen Shermohammed ◽

Juliet Y. Davidow ◽

Leah Somerville ◽

Vishnu Murty

Keyword(s):

Memory Performance ◽

Emotional Memory ◽

False Alarms ◽

Long Term Memory ◽

Memory Representation ◽

Correct Identification ◽

Open Questions ◽

Memory Representations ◽

Stress Influences

Psychological stress during memory encoding influences resulting memory representations. However, open questions remain regarding how stress interacts with emotional memory. This interaction has mainly been studied by characterizing the correct identification of previously observed material (memory “hits”), with few studies investigating how stress influences the incorrect endorsement of unobserved material as remembered (memory “false alarms”). While hits can provide information about the presence or strength of a memory representation, false alarms provide insight into the fidelity of those representations, indicating to what extent stored memories are confused with similar information presented at retrieval. This study examined the effects of stress on long-term memory for negative and neutral images, considering the separate contributions of hits and false alarms. Participants viewed images after repeated exposure to either a stress or a control manipulation. Stress impaired memory performance for negative pictures and enhanced memory performance for neutral pictures. These effects were driven by false alarms rather than hits: stressed participants false alarmed more often for negative and less often for neutral images. These data suggest that stress undermines the benefits of emotion on memory by changing individuals’ susceptibility towards false alarms, and highlight the need to consider both memory strength and fidelity to characterize differences in memory performance.

Download Full-text

Decoding the Neural Representation of Self and Person Knowledge with Multivariate Pattern Analysis and Data Driven Approaches

10.31234/osf.io/wr6gq ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Dylan D. Wagner ◽

Robert Chavez ◽

Timothy W. Broom

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

Conceptual Knowledge ◽

Person Perception ◽

Pattern Analysis ◽

Social Groups ◽

The Self ◽

Neural Representation ◽

Data Driven ◽

Multivariate Pattern Analysis ◽

Multivariate Pattern

Multivariate pattern analysis and data driven approaches to understanding how the human brain encodes sensory information and higher level conceptual knowledge have become increasingly dominant in visual and cognitive neuroscience, however it is only in recent years that these methods have been applied to the domain of social information processing. This review examines recent research in the field of social cognitive neuroscience focusing on how multivariate pattern analysis (e.g., pattern classification, representational similarity analysis) and data-driven methods (e.g, reverse correlation, intersubject correlation) have been used to decode and characterize high-level information about the self, other persons and social groups. We begin with a review of what is known about how self-referential processing and person perception are represented in the medial prefrontal cortex based on conventional activation-based neuroimaging approaches. This is followed by a non-technical overview of current multivariate pattern-based and data-driven neuroimaging methods designed to characterize and/or decode neural representations. The remainder of the review focuses on examining how these methods have been applied to the topic of self, person perception and the perception of social groups. Throughout, we highlight recent trends (e.g., analysis of social networks, decoding race and social groups, the use of naturalistic stimuli) and discuss several theoretical challenges that arise from the application of these new methods to the question of how the brain represents knowledge about the self and others.

Download Full-text