Temporal neural mechanisms underlying conscious access to different levels of facial stimulus contents.
Journal of Neurophysiology April 1, 2018 Shen-Mou Hsu, Yu-Fang Yang
Using magnetoencephalography, the study shows that conscious access to different levels of facial content—identity versus configural features—involves distinct neural events before, during, and after stimulus presentation. Before a masked face appears, phase angle adjustments differ depending on which level will be consciously accessed. During stimulus presentation, stronger phase clustering occurs for awareness of facial identity. After target onset, conscious access to facial identity elicits more robust late positivity than access to configural features. The findings suggest that prestimulus and stimulus-related neural activities combine to determine which level of facial content reaches consciousness, challenging the notion that conscious face detection always precedes identification.