Personally familiar proper names are relatively successfully processed in the human right hemisphere; or, the missing link

Responding to our abstract in Brain and Language (Ohnesorge & Van Lancker, 1999), which proposed that famous proper nouns are successfully processed in both cerebral hemispheres, Schweinberger, Landgrebe, Mohr, and Kaufmann (2001) claimed that the "link" between personal names and the right hemisphere is "illusory." Ohnesorge and Van Lancker (2001) further described six experimental studies in which LVF/RH recognition of famous proper nouns was influenced by task conditions and stimulus familiarity. Here presenting two more experiments performed to explore the refutation presented by Schweinberger et al., this article confirms an ability of the right hemisphere to recognize famous proper nouns and explains why appropriate stimulus development and task conditions are essential in furthering our understanding of the role of the right hemisphere in processing personal relevance.     

Lateralised processing of the internal and the external facial features of personally familiar and unfamiliar faces: a visual half-field study

In this visual half field (VHF) experiment, we investigated possible differences between the left and the right hemisphere in the processing of the internal and external features of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Previous studies using famous and unknown faces had indicated that both hemispheres use the same qualitative mode of processing with the internal features being more important for the perception of familiar faces. In this experiment, personally familiar faces rather than famous faces are used. There are several, mainly methodological, reasons why personally familiar faces are more appropriate stimuli to investigate face processing. The results of the present study showed that no overall visual field effect occurred, but more importantly, that face processing in the left hemisphere differed qualitatively from that in the right hemisphere. The theoretical repercussions of these findings are discussed.     

Cerebral laterality for famous proper nouns: visual recognition by normal subjects

Lexical processing has long been associated with left-hemisphere function, especially for infrequently occurring words. Recently, however, persons with severe aphasia, including word-recognition deficits, were observed to recognize familiar proper nouns. Further, some patients suffering right-hemisphere damage were poorer at identifying famous names than left-hemisphere-damaged subjects. These observations point to the possibility that some property of the right hemisphere provides an advantage for the processing of familiar or personally relevant stimuli. To investigate this possibility, we conducted split-visual-field studies in which we manipulated stimulus sets, recognition task, and exposure duration. Greater accuracy in the right visual field was found for common nouns and unknown proper nouns, and famous proper nouns were overall more accurately recognized. Performance for famous nouns in the two visual fields was not significantly different when the task required categorization into famous or nonfamous and when stimuli most highly rated as familiar were used. These findings support our proposals that (1) both hemispheres can process famous proper nouns and (2) the right hemisphere is specialized for personal relevance.     

Preserved recognition of familiar personal names in global aphasia.

Recognition of proper and common nouns was compared in four patients diagnosed with global aphasia secondary to ischemic left-hemisphere infarction. For proper noun recognition, subjects matched the spoken or written name of a famous person to a photograph, and for common nouns, subjects were tested on standardized and special word recognition tests. As expected, common noun recognition was severely compromised in the aphasic patients. In contrast, familiar personal names, despite their greater length and complexity, were recognized equally well by aphasic and normal control subjects. The right hemisphere may mediate the ability to recognize personally familiar names, as it may be specialized for establishing personally relevant environmental stimuli.     

Personal names and the human right hemisphere: an illusory link?

Names are thought to be represented in the brain differently from common nouns. Although this idea is supported by both theoretical and empirical arguments, the brain areas that are relevant for the recognition of personal names-and in particular the extent of right hemisphere involvement-remain controversial. We investigated the hypothesis that, unlike common nouns, personal names are represented preferentially by the right hemisphere (D. Van Lancker, 1991; D. Van Lancker et al., 1991; C. Ohnesorge & D. Van Lancker, 1999). Participants performed lexical decisions to common nouns and pseudowords (Experiment 1) or familiarity decisions to personal names (Experiment 2), which were presented briefly to the left or right visual fields. Asymmetries were small or absent for both pseudowords and unfamiliar names. For familiar names, both reaction times and error rates revealed strong advantages for the right visual field/left hemisphere (RVF/LH), which were comparable to the asymmetries for nouns. Familiar personal names may be represented by brain systems that differ from those representing common nouns, but current evidence does not suggest a distinct contribution of the right hemisphere to these brain systems.     

Face recognition: a general or specific right hemisphere capacity?

Face-recognition ability has been claimed to be qualitatively different from other pattern-recognition abilities. One argument for this claim is the finding of a significant right hemisphere advantage for the recognition of upright but not inverted faces. However, this argument is justified only if this orientation-sensitive pattern is unique to faces. In the present study, comparable patterns of orientation-sensitive involvement of the right hemisphere are found for the recognition of faces and houses. This finding is interpreted as evidence for a right hemisphere schema formation capacity that is applied not only to upright faces but also to other familiar classes of stimuli in their canonical upright orientation. It is suggested that any greater right hemisphere involvement in the recognition of upright faces is due to our greater expertise at recognizing faces than other stimulus types. We also find evidence that only a subset of right-handed adults show orientation-sensitive right hemisphere involvement in the recognition of faces and houses: in particular, those dextrals with a characteristic hemispheric arousal asymmetry in favor of the right hemisphere. In contrast, dextrals with a characteristic arousal asymmetry in favor of the left hemisphere do not show significant visual field asymmetries for faces or houses in either upright or inverted orientations.     

Recall,recognition, and the hippocampus: Reply to Yonelinas et al. (2004)

Two recent studies disagree about whether recall is more impaired than recognition (and recollection more than familiarity) in patients with damage limited to the hippocampus (Manns, Hopkins, Reed, Kitchener, & Squire, 2003; Yonelinas et al., 2002). Wixted and Squire (2004) pointed out that the disagreement about recall and recognition stems entirely from an outlying recognition score obtained by 1 of 55 control subjects in Yonelinas et al. (2002). In their comment on our paper, Yonelinas et al. (2004) minimize the importance of this result and argue that the role of the hippocampus in recollection and familiarity is best studied using different methods that attempt to measure these processes directly. Here, we argue that the recall versus recognition comparison is the strongest test because it relies on the fewest controversial assumptions, and that the other approaches explored by Yonelinas et al. (2002) rely on questionable, theory-laden assumptions. We also rehearse the reasons for concluding that the patients studied by Manns et al. (2003) have damage limited to the hippocampal region (hippocampus proper, dentate gyrus, and subiculum), and we emphasize that important questions remain about the patients studied by Yonelinas et al. (2002), inasmuch as no neuroanatomical information and minimal neuropsychological information has been provided.     

Order of feature recognition in familiar and unfamiliar faces

Three experiments measured order of processing for single faces presented to the left or right visual field (VF) using a same-different matching task. In contrast to earlier studies, the stimuli in the present experiments were carefully matched for overall similarity prior to the actual experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that a significant top-to-bottom order of processing occurred for line drawings of unfamiliar faces but not for line drawings of familiar faces. Experiment 3 found evidence supporting top-to-bottom processing for unfamiliar photographic face stimuli. The photographic stimuli in Experiment 3 were matched more quickly when presented in the left VF (right hemisphere); however, this VF asymmetry was not related to previously reported differences in order of processing. It is suggested that under some conditions faces presented to the right hemisphere may be processed more like familiar faces than faces presented to the left hemisphere; however, this difference is not critical for the left VF (right hemisphere) superiority often found in face recognition tasks.     

Recalling semantic information about personally known faces and voices

Previous research that investigated whether biographical information about familiar people is harder to retrieve from voices than from faces produced contrasting results. However, studies that used a strict control of the content of spoken extracts reported that semantic information about familiar people is easier to retrieve when recognising a face than when recognising a voice. In all previous studies faces and voices of famous people were used as stimuli. In the present study, personally familiar people's voices and faces (standard faces and blurred faces) were used. Presenting such people (i.e., participants’ teachers) allowed controlling still more strictly the content of the spoken extracts since it was possible to ask all the target persons to speak the same words. In addition, it was previously stressed that we encounter famous people's faces in the media more frequently than we hear their voice. This methodological difficulty was presumably reduced when teachers’ faces were presented. Present results showed a significant decrease in retrieval of biographical information from familiar voices relative to blurred faces even though the level of overall recognition was similar for blurred faces and voices. The role of the relative distinctiveness of voices and faces is discussed and further investigation is proposed.     

Famous faces as icons. The illusion of being an expert in the recognition of famous faces

It is a common belief that we are experts in the processing of famous faces. Although our ability to quickly and accurately recognise pictures of famous faces is quite impressive, we might not really process famous faces as faces per se, but as 'icons' or famous still pictures of famous faces. This assumption was tested in two parallel experiments employing a recognition task on famous, but personally unfamiliar, and on personally familiar faces. Both tests included (a) original, 'iconic' pictures, (b) slightly modified versions of familiar pictures, and (c) rather unfamiliar pictures of familiar persons. Participants (n = 70 + 70) indeed recognised original pictures of famous and personally familiar people very accurately, while performing poorly in recognising slightly modified, as well as unfamiliar versions of famous, but not personally familiar persons. These results indicate that the successful processing of famous faces may depend on icons imbued in society but not on the face as such.     

Hemispheric Differences in the Recognition of Environmental Sounds

ABSTRACT— Recent work has found support for two dissociable and parallel neural subsystems underlying object and shape recognition in the visual domain: an abstract-category subsystem that operates more effectively in the left cerebral hemisphere than in the right, and a specific-exemplar subsystem that operates more effectively in the right hemisphere than in the left. Evidence of this asymmetry has been observed for linguistic stimuli (words, pseudoword forms) and nonlinguistic stimuli (objects). In the auditory domain, we previously found hemispheric asymmetries in priming effects using linguistic stimuli (spoken words). In the present study, we conducted four long-term repetition-priming experiments to investigate whether such hemispheric asymmetries would be observed for nonlinguistic auditory stimuli (environmental sounds) as well. The results support the dissociable-subsystems theory. Specificity effects were obtained when sounds were presented to the left ear (right hemisphere), but not when sounds were presented to the right ear (left hemisphere). Theoretical implications are discussed.     

Is there an in-group advantage in emotion recognition?

H. A. Elfenbein and N. Ambady (2002) examined the evidence for an in-group advantage in emotion recognition, whereby recognition is generally more accurate for perceivers from the same cultural group as emotional expressors. D. Matsumoto's (2002) comment centered on 3 asserted methodological requirements. This response addresses the lack of consensus conceming these "requirements" and demonstrates that none alter the presence of the in-group advantage. His analyses had a serious flaw and, once corrected, replicated the original findings. Furthermore, he described results from his empirical work not meeting a literal interpretation of his own requirements. Overall, where Matsumoto considers subtle cross-cultural differences in emotional expression a methodological artifact in judgment studies, the present authors find a core phenomenon worthy of attention.     

Stimulus generation, ratings, phoneme counts, and group classifications for 696 famous people by British adults over 40 years of age

Matching stimuli across a range of influencing variables is no less important for studies of face recognition than it is for those of word processing. Whereas a number of corpora exist to allow experimenters to select a carefully controlled set of word stimuli, similar databases for famous faces do not exist. This article, therefore, provides researchers in the area of face recognition with a useful resource on which to base their stimulus selection. In the first phase of the investigation, British adults over 40 years of age were requested to generate the names of famous people (or celebrities) that they thought they would recognize and to write these down. The most frequently named celebrities were then rated by adults from the same age population for familiarity, distinctiveness, and age of acquisition. The result is a database of 696 famous people, with an indication of their relative eminence in the public consciousness and rated for these important variables. Phoneme counts are also provided for each famous person, together with family name frequency counts in the general population, where available. Materials and links may be accessed at www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Common neural systems associated with the recognition of famous faces and names: An event-related fMRI study

Person recognition can be accomplished through several modalities (face, name, voice). Lesion, neurophysiology and neuroimaging studies have been conducted in an attempt to determine the similarities and differences in the neural networks associated with person identity via different modality inputs. The current study used event-related functional-MRI in 17 healthy participants to directly compare activation in response to randomly presented famous and non-famous names and faces (25 stimuli in each of the four categories). Findings indicated distinct areas of activation that differed for faces and names in regions typically associated with pre-semantic perceptual processes. In contrast, overlapping brain regions were activated in areas associated with the retrieval of biographical knowledge and associated social affective features. Specifically, activation for famous faces was primarily right lateralized and famous names were left-lateralized. However, for both stimuli, similar areas of bilateral activity were observed in the early phases of perceptual processing. Activation for fame, irrespective of stimulus modality, activated an extensive left hemisphere network, with bilateral activity observed in the hippocampi, posterior cingulate, and middle temporal gyri. Findings are discussed within the framework of recent proposals concerning the neural network of person identification.     

Exemplar similarity, study list homogeneity, and short-term perceptual recognition

Kahana and Sekuler (2002) conducted short-term perceptual recognition experiments and modeled the data with a noisy exemplar similarity model. They found model-based evidence that list homogeneity (i.e., the degree to which exemplars on a study list are similar to one another) exerted a significant impact on recognition performance--a finding that is not predicted by standard global familiarity models. A potential limitation of their experiments is that they tested complex stimuli in which psychological similarities among exemplars may have been misspecified. Also, the relative importance of list homogeneity was not compared with that of alternative forms of parametric variation in the model. We conducted conceptual replications of their experiments, using a simpler set of stimuli in which interexemplar similarities could be more precisely measured. Extensive model-based comparisons reveal, in accord with the results of Kahana and Sekuler, strong evidence for a role of listhomogeneity on old-new recognition performance. We suggest that subjects systematically adjust their response criteria on the basis of the homogeneity of the study list items.     

中国学生的自我面孔识别

已有研究表明大脑右半球具有自我面孔再认的优势。为了进一步验证这个观点,该研究使用面孔识别任务,以13名右利手的中国大学生为被试,测量被试对morphing面孔的左右手反应差异。给被试呈现第一张面孔向第二张面孔的morphing过程,当被试看到morphing的面孔更像第二张面孔时报告停止。研究有两个morphing过程：一个为由自我面孔向名人面孔morphing,另一个为好朋友面孔（熟悉的）向名人面孔morphing。结果表明当用左手反应时,被试倾向于把morphing的面孔识别为自己,研究中自我面孔再认的左手优势与已有的发现一致。另外,研究还发现在一定trials条件下,熟悉面孔再认也具有左手优势,这一结果与西方被试的结果不一致,但东西方被试对熟悉面孔再认的差异与独立型自我和互倚型自我的观点一致。该文认为神经心理学有关自我的研究可能需要考虑文化和情境的复杂性。     

The accuracy of memory for faces of personally known individuals

The present study was aimed at evaluating whether the very high accuracy of memory for familiar faces, demonstrated by Ge et al (2003, Perception 32 601-614) with a very familiar famous person, generalises to faces of personally known individuals. The accuracy of participants' perceptual memory for a close colleague's face and for their own face was evaluated by presenting original and manipulated pictures of these two targets. The manipulation consisted of increasing or decreasing the interocular distance. As in Ge et al's study, results indicated that proportions of correct recognition of the original faces, and just noticeable differences for the detection of alterations in the recognition task, were not significantly different from the corresponding measures in a perceptual discrimination task performed by a sample of participants who did not know the target persons at all. High accuracy of memory generalises to faces of personally known individuals.     

The effects of distinctiveness in recognising and classifying faces

In an earlier study it was found that distinctive familiar faces were recognised faster than typical familiar faces in a familiarity decision task. In the first experiment reported here this effect was replicated with the use of celebrities' faces rather than personally familiar faces. In the second and third experiments the effect of distinctiveness was found to reverse if the task was to distinguish between faces and jumbled faces. Subjects took longer to classify distinctive faces as faces than they did to classify typical faces. Thus distinctive faces were recognised faster, but were classified as faces more slowly than were typical faces, both when personally familiar faces and when famous faces were used as stimuli. These results are interpeted as evidence that faces are encoded by reference to a general face prototype.     

Happiness takes you right: The effect of emotional stimuli on line bisection

Emotion recognition is mediated by a complex network of cortical and subcortical areas, with the two hemispheres likely being differently involved in processing positive and negative emotions. As results on valence-dependent hemispheric specialisation are quite inconsistent, we carried out three experiments with emotional stimuli with a task being sensitive to measure specific hemispheric processing. Participants were required to bisect visual lines that were delimited by emotional face flankers, or to haptically bisect rods while concurrently listening to emotional vocal expressions. We found that prolonged (but not transient) exposition to concurrent happy stimuli significantly shifted the bisection bias to the right compared to both sad and neutral stimuli, indexing a greater involvement of the left hemisphere in processing of positively connoted stimuli. No differences between sad and neutral stimuli were observed across the experiments. In sum, our data provide consistent evidence in favour of a greater involvement of the left hemisphere in processing positive emotions and suggest that (prolonged) exposure to stimuli expressing happiness significantly affects allocation of (spatial) attentional resources, regardless of the sensory (visual/auditory) modality in which the emotion is perceived and space is explored (visual/haptic).     

Activation of right parietal cortex during memory retrieval of nonlinguistic auditory stimuli

In neuroimaging studies, the left ventral posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is particularly active during memory retrieval. However, most studies have used verbal or verbalizable stimuli. We investigated neural activations associated with the retrieval of short, agrammatical music stimuli (Blackwood, 2004), which have been largely associated with right hemisphere processing. At study, participants listened to music stimuli and rated them on pleasantness. At test, participants made old/new recognition judgments with high/low confidence ratings. Right, but not left, ventral PPC activity was observed during the retrieval of these music stimuli. Thus, rather than indicating a special status of left PPC in retrieval, both right and left ventral PPC participate in memory retrieval, depending on the type of information that is to be remembered.