Separated and overlapping neural coding of face and body identity

Recognising a person’s identity often relies on face and body information, and is tolerant to changes in low-level visual input (e.g. viewpoint changes). Previous studies have suggested that face identity is disentangled from low-level visual input in the anterior face-responsive regions. It remains unclear which regions disentangle body identity from variations in viewpoint, and whether face and body identity are encoded separately or combined into a coherent person identity representation. We trained participants to recognize three identities, and then recorded their brain activity using fMRI while they viewed face and body images of the three identities from different viewpoints. Participants’ task was to respond to either the stimulus identity or viewpoint. We found consistent decoding of body identity across viewpoint in the fusiform body area, right anterior temporal cortex, middle frontal gyrus and right insula. This finding demonstrates a similar function of fusiform and anterior temporal cortex for bodies as has previously been shown for faces, suggesting these regions may play a general role in extracting high-level identity information. Moreover, we could decode identity across neural activity evoked by faces and bodies in the early visual cortex, right inferior occipital cortex, right parahippocampal cortex and right superior parietal cortex, revealing a distributed network that encodes person identity abstractly. Lastly, identity decoding was consistently better when participants attended to identity, indicating that attention to identity enhances its neural representation. These results offer new insights into how the brain develops an abstract neural coding of person identity, shared by faces and bodies.

Perceptual and Semantic Phases of Face Identification Processing: A Multivariate Electroencephalography Study

Rapid identification of a familiar face requires an image-invariant representation of person identity. A varying sample of familiar faces is necessary to disentangle image-level from person-level processing. We investigated the time course of face identity processing using a multivariate electroencephalography analysis. Participants saw ambient exemplars of celebrity faces that differed in pose, lighting, hairstyle, and so forth. A name prime preceded a face on half of the trials to preactivate person-specific information, whereas a neutral prime was used on the remaining half. This manipulation helped dissociate perceptual- and semantic-based identification. Two time intervals within the post-face onset electroencephalography epoch were sensitive to person identity. The early perceptual phase spanned 110–228 msec and was not modulated by the name prime. The late semantic phase spanned 252–1000 msec and was sensitive to person knowledge activated by the name prime. Within this late phase, the identity response occurred earlier in time (300–600 msec) for the name prime with a scalp topography similar to the FN400 ERP. This may reflect a matching of the person primed in memory with the face on the screen. Following a neutral prime, the identity response occurred later in time (500–800 msec) with a scalp topography similar to the P600f ERP. This may reflect activation of semantic knowledge associated with the identity. Our results suggest that processing of identity begins early (110 msec), with some tolerance to image-level variations, and then progresses in stages sensitive to perceptual and then to semantic features.

Autoethnography as a Poetics of Worlding and a Politics of Becoming: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects

This article analyzes the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects and the poet Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric as autoethnographies of affective encounter in which the authors stylistically fracture their positionalities such that the embodied evidence of experience becomes visceral political potential. In Ordinary Affects, Stewart uses autoethnography to conjure the intensities of affect that manifest in everyday moments and spaces of encounter, detailing disparate scenes of immanent force to provide an antidote to academic studies that render power inert as they employ totalizing systems such as “neoliberalism” to analyze its effects. Using “she” to index the difference between her first-person identity as a writer and a body that imagines and senses the political-as-becoming, Stewart invites readers to participate in a poetics of worlding during which the author does not play expert witness. In the American lyric Citizen, Claudia Rankine also splits her narrative voice and uses both “I” and “you,” while evoking affective encounters of racialization that are forces of habit and routines of violence. Her poem includes not only personal anecdote or feeling but also events and texts of popular culture, enlisting her readers to take part in a poetics of worlding and a politics of becoming through which the author bears witness to “I” through “you.” In effect, Rankine and Stewart use autoethnography to resist portraying political life as bound by discursive logics of self and subjecthood.

Authenticity, Digital Media, and Person Identity Verification

Identity theory models authenticity as the outcome of person identity verification. In a parallel literature from digital media studies, the concept of authenticity has emerged as a central concern. Through interviews with American adults, I examine authenticity in relation to social media, using an identity theory frame. I show the specific tactics people use to present “true” versions of themselves, and how they censure those who fail to do so. Through participants’ narratives, I distill two principles of authenticity in a digital age: curation and triangulation. These refer to selective practices of sharing and cultivating a consistent image of self across digital platforms and face-to-face interactions. Those who fail to adhere to these principles may be subject to various forms of disconnection—“un-friending,” “un-following,” and/or general social exclusion. Disconnection minimizes interaction opportunities, making it difficult to verify person identity meanings.