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Electrophysiological Correlates of Facial Identity and Expression Processing

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Developments in Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology

Abstract

The recent growth of research into face recognition has resulted in increasingly refined models of this process based on evidence from behavioural, neuropsychological and neurophysiological studies (Bruce & Young 1986, Rhodes, 1985). The aim of this chapter is to illustrate some of the ways that the study of EEG and event related potentials (ERPs) can provide useful additional information about the timing and distribution of neural events associated with the processing of faces. Studies of scalp recordings of brain electrical activity during the processing of facial information have, in the main, concentrated on the following four issues. What special roles do the right and left hemispheres of the brain have in face processing? To what extent do unique mechanisms exist in the brain for the processing of facial information? Does familiarity affect matching processes in ways similar or different from that associated with words or objects? To what extent are the processing of facial expression and identity separable? The review is split up in to four main sections corresponding roughly to the four questions above but there is some overlap of ideas in these different sections. Not all of the issues relating to each question have been considered and additional information relating to some of these issues can be found in the chapters by Peng and Campbell and by Ellis in this volume.

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© 1989 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Potter, D.D., Parker, D.M. (1989). Electrophysiological Correlates of Facial Identity and Expression Processing. In: Crawford, J.R., Parker, D.M. (eds) Developments in Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9996-5_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9996-5_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-9998-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-9996-5

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