Neural Responses to Familiar Faces
People are better at recognizing familiar versus unfamiliar faces. This effect is particularly pronounced in studies using ambient images from real-world settings, which simultaneously vary across many different visual properties. One line of research in my lab investigates how learning different types of information about faces influences neural responses to the faces.
During graduate school and my postdoc, I used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in my research. After coming to Oberlin, I switched to using electroencephalography (EEG) both because it is more cost effective and because I am able to collect the data on campus and train students to participate in the research. Recent studies in my lab have used a technique called fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) in conjunction with EEG to investigate neural responses to faces. With FPVS, the brain is repetitively stimulated at a constant frequency, resulting in a periodic response at the rate of stimulation and its harmonics that can be recorded using EEG. Research in our lab has demonstrated that familiarization with faces over the course of a week increases the face individuation response as measured via FPVS (Verosky et al., 2020a).
Being able to recognize faces is important for everyday social interactions. Familiar faces typically differ from unfamiliar faces both in terms of the semantic information associated with them and the perceptual experience that people have with them. Research in my lab investigates how faces become familiar, as well as social cognition more broadly.
Image from Verosky et al., JPSP, 2018
Forming Impressions
Although people readily form impressions based solely on facial appearance, they are also quite good at updating these impressions once additional information, such as information about a person’s past actions, becomes available. In my behavioral work, I have found that people readily retrieve the affective knowledge associated with familiar faces, even under circumstances that prevent careful reflection (Verosky et al., 2018). My lab has also demonstrated that it is possible to use FPVS to detect implicit responses to face trustworthiness (Verosky et al., 2020b). However, we have also failed to find an effect of learned trustworthy versus untrustworthy behaviors on the FPVS response, raising questions about the types of designs and stimuli that yield responses that are measurable with FPVS (Verosky et al., 2024).
Image from Verosky et al., Biological Psychology, 2020a