Temporal context in face perception: The interaction of competition and prediction
Final Report Abstract
The temporal context of a stimulus, or in other words the perceptual history of the observer determines the judgements about the surrounding environment. As of today we know surprisingly little about the effect of such previous experiences on the perception of faces and other “social” stimuli and about the neural background mechanisms of these effects. The central aim of the proposal was to study these modulatory processes of human person representation, using combined psychophysical, electrophysiological and neuroimaging methods and stimulation techniques. Two strands of experiments were realised during the experiments in healthy participants. First, the bottom-up sensory competitions between simultaneously and sequentially presented stimuli were tested. We capitalized upon the previously found interactions between multiple, simultaneously presented faces as well as the adaptation effects between sequentially presented stimuli and we studied the neural correlates of sensory competition and adaptation processes, using fMRI and ERP recordings. Second, the neural correlates of perceptual decisions about faces, biased by prior information and cues are tested within the theoretical frame of predictive coding. We tested how top-down information (such as expectations and predictions) affect the neural processing of subsequent stimuli and how this is reflected in repetition related phenomena. The separation of bottom-up and top-down related neural mechanisms, applying neuroimaging techniques led to a better understanding of temporal contextual effects.
Publications
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(2013). Dissociating the neural bases of repetition-priming and adaptation in the human brain for faces. Journal of Neurophysiology, 110(12), 2727-38
Kaiser, D., Walther, C., Schweinberger, S. R., & Kovács, G.
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(2013). Repetition probability does not affect fMRI repetition suppression for objects. Journal of Neuroscience, 33(23), 9805-9812
Kovács, G., Kaiser, D., Kaliukhovich, D., Vidnyánszky, Z., & Vogels, R.
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(2014). Repetition probability effects depend on prior experiences. Journal of Neuroscience, 34(19), 6640-6646
Grotheer, M., & Kovács, G.
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(2014). Repetition probability effects for inverted faces. Neuroimage, 102, 416-423
Grotheer, M., Hermann, P., Vidnyánszky, Z., & Kovács, G.
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(2016). Can predictive coding explain repetition suppression? Cortex, 80, 113-124
Grotheer, M., & Kovács, G.
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(2016). Does surprise enhancement or repetition suppression explain visual mismatch negativity? European Journal of Neuroscience, 43(12), 1590-1600
Amado, C., & Kovács, G.
