Psychology, 2010, 1: 199-208
doi:10.4236/psych.2010.13027 Published Online August 2010 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/psych)
Copyright © 2010 SciRes. PSYCH
199
Tolerance of the ERP Signatures of Unfamiliar
versus Familiar Face Perception to Spatial
Quantization of Facial Images*
Liisa Hanso1, Talis Bachmann1,2, Carolina Murd1,2
1University of Tartu, Institute of Psychology, Tartu, Estonia; 2University of Tartu, Institute of Public Law, Tartu, Estonia.
Email: talis.bachmann@ut.ee
Received June 4th, 2010; revised July 9th, 2010; accepted July 12th, 2010.
ABSTRACT
Processing of faces as stimuli is known to be associated with a conspicuous ERP component N170. Processing of fa-
miliar faces is found to be associated with an increased amplitude of the ERP components N250r and P300, including
when a subject wishes to conceal face familiarity. Leaving facial images without high spatial frequency content by low
pass spatial filtering does not eliminate face-perception signatures of ERP. Here, for the first time, we tested whether
these facial-processing ERP-signatures can be recorded also when facial images are spatially quantized by pixelation,
a procedure where in addition to impoverishment of face-specific information by spatial-frequency filtering a compet-
ing masking structure is generated by the square-shaped pixels. We found dependence of N170 expression on level of
pixelation and P300 amplitudes dependent on familiarity with 21 pixels-per-face and 11 pixels-per-face images, but not
with 6 pixels-per-face images. ERP signatures of facial information processing tolerate image degradation by spatial
quantization do wn to abou t 11 pixels per face and this holds despite th e subjects wish to concea l his or her familiarity
with some of the faces.
Keywords: Face Recognition, Spatial Quantization, N170, P300, Deception
1. Introduction
The ability to identify and discriminate faces is a major
research field in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psy-
chology, artificial pattern recognition and forensic re-
search [1-12]. Advancement of knowledge in this area
promises considerable developments and gains in tech-
nology, economy, security-state of society, etc. Among
several urgent tasks, finding objective and reliable brain-
process signatures of face recogn ition and fa miliar versus
unfamiliar face discrimination can be especially empha-
sised. Inter alia, electroencephalographic (EEG) event
related potentials (ERPs) based methods have shown
their good applicability for the above-mentioned pur-
poses. EEG/ERP are a relatively cheap, non-invasive,
well standardised and internationally quite widespread
means to study brain-process signatures of processing
meaningful object information, supported by an impres-
sive amount of documented psychophysiological facts
and regularities from basic and applied research.
In practical applications of face recognition research,
many directions have emerged and many important re-
sults obtained. However, quite many unsolved or unex-
plored problems remain [2,11]. For example, it may be
the case that the images of facial stimuli that are to be
shown to perceiving subjects (e.g., in order to evaluate if
the subject recognises a face or identifies a familiar face)
are degraded due to some technical problems or imper-
fections. Often the available facial information is repre-
sented as a pixelized image with poor resolution. It is
useful to know whether these stimuli can be nevertheless
used as critical stimuli for testing and expertise and what
is the scale of degradation tolerated by the automatic
face-processing routines in the brain so that meaningful
and actually sensitive ERP sig natures of face recognition
and/or face familiarity can be still registered and evalu-
ated. Up to now there is no face-identification ERP-re-
search using poor-quality pixelated images.
The three ERP components registered from the human
scalp that are strongly involved in face processing are
N170, N250r, and P300 [13-18]. N170 is a quite robust
*This study was supported by Estonian Ministry of Education and
Research through Scientific Competency Council (targeted financing
research theme SF0182717s06, “Mechanisms of Visual Attention”).
Tolerance of the ERP Signatures of Unfamiliar versus Familiar Face Perception to
Spatial Quantization of Facial Images
Copyright © 2010 SciRes. PSYCH
200
signature of facial image processing found in many stud-
ies and under a wide variety of facial stimuli, spectral
contents of face-images and perceptual tasks [13,16,17,
19-23]. It is a negative potential deflection appearing
about 130-200 ms after presentation of a facial stimulus,
peaking at about 170 ms. N170 can be best registered
from the occipito-temporal, temporal and temporal-pa-
rietal electrodes [15,19,24]. It appears that face familiar-
ity does not influence N170 [16,25,26]. N250r is a nega-
tive-polarity ERP component that has been related to
image-independent representations of familiar faces aid-
ing person recognition [27]. P300 as a positive-polarity
potential that appears about 300-500 ms after stimulus
presentation is widely accepted as a signature of work-
ing-memory analysis involving categorical cognitive
processing and comparisons, context updating, resource
allocation and meaningfulness evaluation [28,29]. A va-
riety of P300 called P3b which is a signature of cate-
gorical, memory dependent processing is best expressed
over parietal and temporal-parietal areas. Importantly,
the amplitude of the late positive ERP components may
be significantly increased when familiar, relevant or at-
tended stimuli (e.g., faces) as opposed to unfamiliar or
nonrelevant stimuli are presented [18,30-33]. Because
there are many brain sites that increase breadth and am-
plitude of activity in reponse to highly meaningful or
attention-demanding faces as opposed to less significant
faces [34] it is not unanimously agreed upon what are the
exact brain sites maximally contributing to the increase
in the brain responses to significant faces. Importantly,
the increased brain response to more highly meaningful
stimuli occurs even when a subject tries to conceal fa-
miliarity of a particular stimulus item that reliably has a
capacity to lead to an enhanced response such as the
P300 amplitude [33]. With familiar faces, P300 may be
transformed so that a face-specific negative deflection,
N400f precedes typical positivity at about 300-500 ms
post stimulus [16]. As mentioned above, it is important to
know whether and to what extent ERPs that are sen sitive
to faces and facial familiarity can be present when facial
information is degraded.
Some studies have manipulated facial stimulus-images
by filtering out detailed (facial) information by spatial
low-pass filtering and then measured subjects’ ERP re-
sponses [17,20,21,35]. It appears that if only coarse-scale
face related spatial information is present, ERPs still dif-
ferentiate between faces and non-faces and/or between
different categorization tasks, with coarse-scale informa-
tion sometimes leading to relatively better expressed
N170 compared to fine-scale faces [20,21,35,36]. How-
ever, simple spatial filtering may bring in confounds be-
tween image spatial frequency components and lower
level features such as luminance and contrast (see, e.g.,
[37,38] on how to circumvent these problems]. It is
therefore important for new studies to use experimental
controls over these fac t ors (see our text below).
In practice, security surveillance recordings also often
produce facial images that are impoverished, degraded
and/or distorted, which makes obstacles for high-quality
and reliable evidence-gathering and eyewitness reports
[2,11,31]. However, a typical degradation of such images
involves not only and not so much spatial low-pass fil-
tering per se, but also often these images are spatially
quantized (pixelized) so that in addition to the filtering
out of higher spatial frequencies of image content (its
fine detail), the mosaic-like structure of the squares pro-
duced by the image-processing algorithms that are used
in producing pixelised images represents an additional
image structure besides the authentic facial low-frequ-
ency content [39-43]. This extra image content (squares
with vertical and horizontal sharp edges and orthogonal
corners; see, e.g., Figure 1) provides a competing struc-
ture for the perceptual systems of image feature extrac-
tion, figure-ground discrimination and visual-categorical
interpretation. In a sense, this procedure, in addition to
filtering out virtually all of the useful fine-scale informa-
tion does also something else – it adds also a newly
formed masking structure. It is important to know
whether brain systems of facial information processing
can be immune to this kind of complication or not.
Equally important, it would be useful to know whether
spatial quantization could change an image in a way that
different cues of diag nosticity become to be used , but the
ERP signatures of face processing, by using these new
cues, may show sensitivity to categorical facial differ-
ences (e.g., familiarity). Hypothetically, this may lead to
increased categorical sensitivity o f ERPs compared to the
absence of this kind of sensitivity which has been the
case when unquantized, but otherwise filtered face-im-
ages have been used [16,25,26]. The existing research
literature does not provide an answer to these questions.
Most of the studies of spatially quantised image rec-
ognition have been strictly psychophysical – e.g., [39-42].
Up to our knowledge, the only psychophysiological
study where spatially quantized images of faces were
used was that by Ward [44], but because monkeys were
used as perceivers and because only very coarse quan-
tized images with 8 pixels/face or less were used, her
findings showing that discrimination between quantized
face and nonface stimuli was not possible cannot be
strongly ge neralized.
Coincidentally, spatial manipulation by quantization is
free of the methodological problem that accompanies the
traditional standard spatial filtering where selectively
filtering out certain frequencies may also lead to filtering
out luminance and/or local contrast information to a dif-
ferent extent. Because spatial pixelation is based on cal-
culating average luminances within precisely defined
Tolerance of the ERP Signatures of Unfamiliar versus Familiar Face Perception to
Spatial Quantization of Facial Images
Copyright © 2010 SciRes. PSYCH
201
square-shaped areas of the original image, spatially
quantized images do not bring in artefacts of unequal
luminance filtering.
Face-sensitive bioelectrical signatures of processing
heavily rely on configural attributes of facial images,
with three main types of configural cues involved [6]: 1)
first-order relational processing allowing to specify a
stimulus as a face as such, 2) holistic (Gestalt-) process-
ing leading to a mutually supportive, integrated structural
set of features, 3) second-order relational processing that
uses metric information about spacing of facial features
and thus enables discrimination of individual faces. By
spatially quantizing faces, and beginning from a rela-
tively coarse level of quantization, we eliminate local
featural information and seriously disturb second-order
configural processing, at the same time introducing rela-
tively less distortions into first-order and into holistic
processing. If it would happen that in termediate level (or
even coarse level) spatial quantization does not eliminate
face-sensitive ERP signatures and maybe even does not
eliminate EEG-sensitivity to the familiarity of faces, then
we would show that coarse-scale configural information
in the conditions where it is presented within the context
of a competing and conflicting structural cues is proc-
essed to the extent that allows one to carry out instru-
mental procedures of detecting (familiar) face detection
and discri minat i on with quantized images.
The present study has two main ai ms. First, it is to test
if spatially quantized images of faces can carry percep-
tual information sufficient for brain processes to dis-
criminate different classes of facial images and if the
answer to this question is positive – to see what is the
approximate spatial scale of pixelation coarseness that
allows to carry this information. Th e second ai m is to test
whether spatially quantized facial images when they can
help lead to ERP signatures of face discrimination enable
to differentiate familiar face image processing and unfa-
miliar face image processing in the conditions where the
perceiver tries to conceal his/her familiarity with some of
the faces. We put forward three general hypotheses. 1.
Spatially quantized images of faces as stimuli carry con-
figural information that can be used by brain processes to
generate ERP signatures typical for facial image proc-
essing (e.g., N170) and can therefore lead to reliable ERP
differences as a function of the scale of spatial quantiza-
tion. 2. Spatially quantized images of faces lead to ERP
signatures that are sensitive to face familiarity (e.g., P300)
despite that local featural information is filtered out, sec-
ond-order configural information is distorted and masked
and despite that subjects try to conceal their familiarity
with some of the stimuli faces. 3. There is a critical level
of coarseness of spatial quantization beyond which ERP
signatures of processing facial images do not anymore
discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar faces.
2. Methods
2.1 Participants
Six female subjects (age range 20-25 years) who were
naïve about the research hypotheses of the present study
participated. All had normal or corrected-to-normal vi-
sion. The subject sample was selected opportunistically
from the pool of bachelor-level students of Tallinn Uni-
versity.
2.2 Experimental Setup and Procedure
Frontal images of human faces were used as the visual
stimuli. Each subject was presented repeatedly with 6
versions of the facial images of the 2 persons well famil-
iar to them and repeatedly with 30 versions of the facial
images of 10 unfamiliar persons. The images subtended
3.8° × 5.7°. All images were achromatic gray scale im-
ages. They varied between three levels of spatial quanti-
zation (pixelation by a mosaic transform): 8 × 8 screen-
pixels (corresponding to about 21 pixels per face width
within the image), 16 × 16 screen-pixels (about 11 pixels
per face width), and 32 × 32 screen-pixels (about 6 pixels
per face width (Figure 1). (The intermediate level quan-
tization value at 11 pixels/face which is an approximate
equivalent of 5.5 cycles/face was chosen to be slightly
lower than the 8 cycles/face spatial low-pass filtering
used in [20,21] as a border value between high- and low
spatial frequency filtered facial images.) The space-av-
erage luminances of all stimuli images were set equal at
about 40 cd/m2. Stimuli were presented on EIZO Flex-
Scan T550 monitor (85 Hz refresh rate).
Stimuli were presented on a computer monitor con-
(a) (b) (c)
Figure 1. Examples of stimuli: (a) pixel size 8 × 8 (approxi-
mately 21 pixels/face); (b) pixel size 16 × 16 (approximately
11 pixels/face); (c) pixel size 32 × 32 (approximately 6 pix-
els/face). In (a), all three basic varieties of configural infor-
mation (first-order, holistic, second-order) are kept present;
in (b), local featural information is filtered our, sec-
ond-order configural information is strongly distorted, but
holistic information kept present; in (c), first-order con-
figural information is considerably degraded, holistic in-
formation is severely degraded, and second-order con-
figural information is maximally degraded if not elimi-
nated
Tolerance of the ERP Signatures of Unfamiliar versus Familiar Face Perception to
Spatial Quantization of Facial Images
Copyright © 2010 SciRes. PSYCH
202
trolled by a custom made VB program at a viewing dis-
tance equal to 150 cm. The program and computer regi-
men allowed necessary synchronization so that no split-
ting of facial images ocurred. Synchronized with face
presentation, a trigger signal was sent to the EEG re-
cording system to mark the time each stimulus face was
presented. All stimuli were presented in random order,
each of them 10 times. (The fact that the probability of
seeing a particular familiar face is different from the
probability of seeing an unfamiliar face is acceptable
because ERP signatures showing tuning to meaningful
stimuli are not sensitive to the probability of a stimulus,
but are sensitive to the pro bability of the stimulus class –
[28].) Duration of the stimuli was set at 480 ms. There
were 360 trials per subject. (As it is known that
face-sensitive responses may decrease with stimuli repe-
tition, our design can be acceptable provided that facial
stimuli that have different significance and/or meaning
for the subject are all similarly susceptible to this de-
crease. Research based on fMRI and MEG methods has
shown this to be the case – [45,46].) Subjects were in-
structed to “play a game”, meaning that they knew that
experimenters tried to use brain EEG-imaging to see
whether they can catch if a familiar face was seen, but
subjects had to conceal any possible signs of familiarity.
Thus subjects were also forced to respond to each face by
saying “unfamiliar”. The experiment was run in a doub le
blind protocol so that experimenters who were standing
by during the experiment did not know whether a famil-
iar or unfamiliar face was shown at each particular trial.
2.3 EEG Recording
EEG was registered by the Nexstim eXimia equipment,
with EEG signals’ sampling rate 1450 Hz. For registra-
tion of ERPs we used electrodes placed at Oz, O1, O2,
P3, P4, T3, T4, TP7, and TP8 (international 10-10 sys-
tem), with common reference at the foreh ead; in addition,
EOG was registered.
2.4 Data Analysis
For EEG data processing, Brain Vision Analyzer 1.05
was used. For processing the raw EEG data for ERPs, a
high-cutoff 30-Hz filter was used. To obtain ERPs, EEG
signal was segmented according to 900 ms peristimulus
epochs (from -200 ms pre-stimulus to +700 ms post-
stimulus). Eye-movement artefacts were eliminated using
Brain Vision Analyzer custom Gratton and Coles algo-
rithm. The EEG data for obtaining ERPs was pooled for
selected regional electrodes and thus 3 conditional re-
gional ERPs were computed: O (pooled electrodes O1,
O2, Oz), T (electrodes T3, T4), and TP (electrodes TP7,
TP8, P3, P4). ERP s were b aseline corrected (–100-0 ms).
In the analysis, we concentrated on ERP components
N170 and P300.
2.5 Statistical Analysis
ERP components’ mean amplitude data gathered from
different subjects and different experimental conditions
was subjected to ANOVA, with factors spatial quantiza-
tion (3 levels) and familiarity (2 levels). Main effects as
well as interactions were tested for sign ifi cance.
3. Results
There are no behavioral results to be reported separately
from ERP results because subjects equally and system-
atically answered “No” to each of the presented quan-
tized faces and tried not to display any signs of possible
familiarity with some of the faces. Figure 2 depicts
grand average ERPs obtained from generalized regions O,
T, and TP as a function of level of pixelation; ERPs are
shown separately for unfamiliar faces (ERP functions on
the left) and for familiar faces (ERP functions on the
right). As seen from Figure 2, distinct ERP components
P100, N170 and P300 are produced for quantized faces
as the visual stimuli.
3.1 N170 Amplitude
ERPs from all recording sites showed distinctive N170 in
responses to faces. However, there were only few statis-
tically significant effects involving our experimental
factors. Measured from the occipital electrodes, the effect
of level of pixelation proved to be significant [F(2, 34) =
6.674, P = 0.014]. The coarsest quantized facial images
(6 pixels/face) were associated with the lowest N170
amplitude. The intermediate level quantized facial im-
ages (11 pixels/face) were associated with at least as
hight N170 amplitude as the finest level quantized facial
images (21 pixels/face). Brain systems that process facial
information and participate in occipital N170 generation
tolerate spatial quantization of facial images up to about
11 pixels per face (along the horizontal dimension).
Measured from the temporal-parietal electrodes, the ef-
fect of level of pixelation on N170 was highly significant
[F(2, 46) = 7.12, P = 0.006], showing that intermediate
and fine quantized facial images are associated with lar-
ger N170 amplitude than coarse quantized images. Inter-
estingly, there was a highly significant interaction be-
tween level of quantization and familiarity [F(2, 46) =
7.105, P = 0.004]. With unfamiliar faces the intermedi-
ate-level quantized images lead to highest N170 ampli-
tude while with familiar faces this trend was reversed.
The effect of familiarity depends on pixelation level and
cannot be considered as a simple additive effect. (When
measured from the temporal electrodes, there were no
significant main effects of pixelation or familiarity on
N170 or significant interaction effects. Fo r level of pixe-
lation, F(2, 22) = 2.895; for familiarity, F(1, 11) = 0.87, P
= 0.371; interaction F(2, 22) = 1.274, P = 0.298.
Tolerance of the ERP Signatures of Unfamiliar versus Familiar Face Perception to
Spatial Quantization of Facial Images
Copyright © 2010 SciRes. PSYCH
203
20
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Figure 2. Grand average ERPs registered from occipital, temporal and temporal-parietal pooled electrodes (negativity up).
Distinct P100, N170 and P300 can be seen. Left column – unfamiliar; right column – familiar. For 21 pixels/face images con-
dition ERPs drawn in black; for 11 pixels/face ERPs in red; for 6 pixels/face ERPs in green
Tolerance of the ERP Signatures of Unfamiliar versus Familiar Face Perception to
Spatial Quantization of Facial Images
Copyright © 2010 SciRes. PSYCH
204
3.2 P300 Amplitude
As measured from occipital electrodes, the effect of pix-
elation level on P300 amplitude was highly significant
[F(2, 34) = 10.644 , P = 0.002] while the effect of famili-
arity was expressed as a trend [F(1, 17) = 3.871, P =
0.066]. Familiar faces lead to higher P300 amplitude.
There was a highly significant interaction between level
of pixelation and familiarity [F(2, 46) = 10.366, P <
0.001. With familiar faces, the finest level of pixelation
lead to P300 amplitude that was distinctly larger than
amplitudes for intermediate level and coarse level quan-
tized images; with unfamiliar faces the finest scale and
intermediate scale quantized images lead to relatively
similar amplitudes of P300 whereas the P300 amplitude
value stood apart from the other two quantization levels.
As measured from temporal-parietal electrodes, the ef-
fects were significant or highly significant: level of pixe-
lation [F(2, 46) = 6.687, P = 0.006], familiarity [F(1, 23)
= 6.923, P < 0.15], interaction between pixelation and
familiarity [F(2, 46) = 10.366, P < 0.001]. All three lev-
els of pixelation lead to mutually distinctive amplitudes
of P300, with the value of amplitude being the largest,
the less coarse the pixelation, but this effect was ex-
pressed only with familiar faces. The P300 amplitude had
a comparable magnitude for all levels of pixelation with
unfamiliar faces (see also Figure 2). As measured from
temporal electrodes, no significant effects of any of the
factors, nor significant interaction, were found (for pixe-
lation, F(2, 22) = 0.199, P = 0.773; for familiarity, F(1,
11) = 1.789, P = 0.208; interaction, F(2, 22) = 1.641, P =
0.218).
4. Discussion
Our results support our hypotheses: 1) Spatially quan-
tized images of faces do carry configural information
which is used by brain processes to generate ERP signa-
tures typical for facial image processing (e.g., N170).
The coarseness range of spatial quantization capable of
communicating facial configuration includes 11 pix-
els/face images (an equivalent of 5.5 cycles/face) or finer.
2) Spatially quantised images of faces lead to ERP sig-
natures that are sensitive to face familiarity (e.g., P300);
this is despite that local featural information is filtered
out, second-order configural information is distorted and
that subjects try to conceal their familiarity with some of
the stimuli-faces. However, the familiarity effect is relia-
bly expressed when measured from the temporal-parietal
electrode locations, but could not be easily obtained from
the occipital and temporal electrodes. 3) There is a criti-
cal level of coarseness of spatial quantization beyond
which ERP signatures of processing facial images do not
anymore discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar
faces. The familiarity effect does not tolerate coarseness
of quantization set at less than 11 pixels/face.
If the square-shaped pixel size in our images was 8 × 8
screen-pixels, this amounted to about 21 pixels per face
quantization (an equivalent of about 10.5 cycles/face).
With this level of image detail, all three basic varieties of
configural information (first-order, holistic, second-order
– [6]) are kept present. (See also Figure 1.) If the pixel
size was 16 × 16 screen pixels, this corresponded to
about 11 pixels per face quantization (roughly 5.5 cy-
cles/face). According to our evaluation, this is sufficient
in order to filter out local featural information, appropri-
ate for strong distortion of second-order configural in-
formation, but allowing holistic information to remain
present in the image. If pixel size of 32 × 32 screen pix-
els was used, a quantized face image with about 6 pixels
per face was created (roughly 3 cycles/face). In that case,
first-order configural information is considerably de-
graded, holistic information is severely degraded, and
second-order configural information is maximally de-
graded if not eliminated. Becaus e familiarity effects were
obtained with 21- and 11- pixels-per-face images and not
with 6- pixels-per-face images and because there was an
interaction between ERP P300 amplitudes and familiarity,
we can conclude that facial familiarity information was
carried primarily by second-order configural cues.
Whereas it is likely that a face is categorized as belong-
ing to the class of familiar faces only after the cues that
allow face individuation had been discriminated, the de-
pendence of the familiarity effect on second-order con-
figural processing is a viable theoretical conclusion. On
the other hand, the absence of main effects of familiarity
on N170 together with the sensitivity of N170 to the
change of spatial quantization between 11 pixels/face and
6 pixels/face levels altogether indicate that this ERP-
component is especially sensitive to the first-order con-
figural cues. Some other works have supported both of
these ideas [6,16,25].
It has been usually accepted that N170 is insensitive to
face familiarity [16,25,26]. Our results are consistent
with this in general terms. One minor exception to this
rule can be noticed when we remember that there was a
significant interaction between familiarity and pixelation
level with temporal-parietal electrodes. Unfamiliar faces
produced expected effects, showing higher N170 ampli-
tude with systematically finer facial stimuli. This can be
explained as better detection of facial first-order con-
figural cues and also holistic templates when image de-
tail gets finer and the competing structure of the
square-shaped pixels’ mosaic gradually loses its distract-
ing power. However, with familiar faces the finest quan-
tization did not lead to a highest N170 peak amplitude.
One possible explanation could assume that 11 pix-
els/face and 21 pixels/face quantization levels in case of
familiar faces are equally efficient for individual face
Tolerance of the ERP Signatures of Unfamiliar versus Familiar Face Perception to
Spatial Quantization of Facial Images
Copyright © 2010 SciRes. PSYCH
205
recognition because of equal ease with which first-order
facial configural representations are activated. This may
be a result of formation of some habitual, automatic link
between second-order featural configuration representa-
tion and first-order facial templates. This speculation
should be tested in specific experiments in future.
Somewhat surprisingly, the finest lev el of quantization
when applied to familiar faces lead to highest P300 am-
plitude also as measured from the occipital electrodes
(with unfamiliar faces, the finest and the intermediate
level quantization yielded equal P300 amplitudes). Al-
though the cortical site of this effect was surprising, the
direction of the effect supported the conclusion about
second-order and featural information being the basis of
familiarity effects. Fine quantization level allows visual
system to recognize a familiar face with high certainty,
which in turn can capture attentional processes to a
stronger degree. Indeed, as shown by [30], focusing at-
tention on certain facial cues enhances the P300 ampli-
tude.
Our design presupposed repetitive presentation of fa-
miliar and unfamiliar faces, appearing in random order
and varying in the low-level attributes which was caused
by the varying levels of quantization. This means at least
two things. First, while sometimes familiar faces ap-
peared successively, but even in the more often occurring
cases they appeared after a few unfamiliar faces had in-
tervened. Thus, this design may be appropriate for find-
ing a certain definite signature of face processing that
seems to be sensitive to face familiarity of successively
presented faces and that presupposes parietal involve-
ment -- the N400f [16]. Yet, our statistical analyses did
not succeed in disentangling this component as a statisti-
cally significant one (see also Figure 2). Secondly, be-
cause in our experiment the same original faces, when
quantized at varying levels, were depicted as different
low-level images, they should have enabled generation of
ERP components that are sensitive to invariant face rec-
ognition with varying low-level attributes of the corre-
sponding facial images. Because familiarity presupposes
recognition (in addition to detection) and because some
of the ERP signatures that are specific to individual face
processing are image-independent (in terms of image
low-level characteristics) and explicable when no more
than only a few items intervene, we should be able to
observe such signatures in our ERPs also. The ERP
component N250r is known to satisfy the above criteria
[18,27]. Unfortunately, our statistical analyses did not
succeed in finding any reliable effects of N250r. On the
other hand, if we observe Figure 3 where ERPs with
strong parietal and temporal involvement are depicted,
we see that familiar face perception is associated with a
visibly stronger negativity between 200 ms and 350 ms
post-stimulus (and only with fine and intermediate scale
pixelation, but not with coarse quantized images). Hope-
fully, subsequent studies when especially targeted on this
observation could produce reliable statistical effects.
15
10
5
0
-5
-10
-15
[µV]
-100 0100 200 300 400 500 600 [ms]
TP7\EEG35Grand Average
(a)
15
10
5
0
-5
-10
-15
[µV]
-100 0100 200300 400500600 [ms]
TP7\EEG35 Grand Average
(b)
15
10
5
0
-5
-10
-15
[µV]
-100 0100 200300 400500600 [ms]
TP7\EEG35 Grand Average
(c)
Figure 3. ERPs recorded from TP7, depicted for fine-scale
quantization; (a) intermediate level quantization; (b) and
coarse-scale quantization; (c) conditions. Familiar faces –
ERPs in black; unfamiliar faces – ERPs in red. With (a)
and (b), familiar faces lead to some N250f-like ERP deflec-
tions
Tolerance of the ERP Signatures of Unfamiliar versus Familiar Face Perception to
Spatial Quantization of Facial Images
Copyright © 2010 SciRes. PSYCH
206
The ERPs that discriminated between familiar and un-
familiar faces were found with face-image pixelation at
11 pixels/face and above, but not with 6 pixels/face im-
ages. This specific value of difference when it sets the
images with above 10 pixels/face quantization apart from
the rest approximately corresponds to the critical pixela-
tion values found in behavioural studies of face identifi-
cation [39,40]. This may mean that processing familiar
facial information from the spatially quantized images
requires that subjects can explicitly discriminate these
quantised images in terms of their facial identity. On the
other hand, when gathering introspective reports from the
subjects after they completed the experiment, it appeared
that some of the actually familiar faces, when quantized
at the intermediate level were not recognized as familiar.
It should be important to carry out further studies in or-
der to ascertain if ERPs could reflect face familiarity
even with explicitly unreco gnized facial images. In addi-
tion to theoretical significance of this question it may be
valuable to solve it also for applied purposes. For exam-
ple, a need may emerge to test whether a person is famil-
iar with some individuals whose low-quality pho tographs
are available and where, therefore, this person has no
explicit awareness of what is depicted in the picture. An-
other applied aspect related to our results is ev en simpler:
we have shown that spatially quantized (pixelated) im-
ages can be used for registration and analysis of face-
sensitive ERPs. This in itself is encouraging.
5. Conclusions
As was stated in the introductory part, spatial quantiza-
tion is an image transform with effects ranging beyond
simple spatial-frequency filtering. The structure of the
square-shaped pixels with their square-corners, square-
edges and formal aspects of the mosaic of square-shapes
provides a visual structure that 1) masks facial configural
cues and 2) sets visual system at the competing demands
of image interpretation – a face versus a mosaic. In these
circumstances there are no strong a priori foundations to
expect an inevitable capability of the visual processing
system to extract face-specific information sufficient for
generation of known face-specific and/or face-sensitive
ERP signatures on the face of the pixelised masking
structure. Our study showed that spatial quantization
does not make an obstacle for the emergence of ERP-
signs of facial processing, including the ones sen sitive to
face familiarity. However, this sensitivity has its limits so
that with pixelation coarseness approaching 6 pixels per
face, familiarity effects on ERP disappear.
6. Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Jaan Aru for his substantial help dur-
ing preparation of this report.
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