UC San Diego

Face perception is the specialized ability to process information about faces. This skill is developed early in life; and as adults, we are experts at categorizing, searching and discriminating individual faces. In this dissertation, we investigated mechanisms selective for processing important facial properties - gender, ethnicity, and individual identity - using a combination of psychophysical and fMRI adaptation method. In Chapter 2, we found that there exist both singly (selective for either gender or ethnicity) and jointly (selective for both gender and ethnicity) tuned mechanisms. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) adaptation paradigm in Chapter 3, we identified cortical regions selective for the gender, ethnicity and identity of individual faces. Finally, in Chapter 4, we examined whether our face adaptation technique on performance in search and discrimination tasks, and found that adaptation had no discernible effects on performance on these tasks