Neural Mechanism Of The Perception Of Animacy

Face is one of the most important biological characteristics of human beings,which reveals information about gender,age,identity,emotion and animacy.With the development of computer technology,the use of artificial faces in the visual media has become more and more common in the past ten years.In various situations,we could find highly-refined synthetic faces and artificial faces.The perception of animacy plays an important role in how we distinguish artificial faces from real ones,vice versa.However,when does this process of perception occur in the facial processing is inconclusive.Many researchers hold the opinion that perceiving animacy is a part of facial processing and it occurs iin the early stage.It means perceiving animacy evokes P1.The other consists perceiving animacy is in the later stage,which evokes LPP component.Therefore,we aim to address this question in the current study.In this study,11 animacy-level faces were created and two experiments were designed using the ERP technique.In the first experiment,we compared the potentials evoked by doll faces and real faces to explore the relationship between LPP component and the perception of animacy,based on which we conduct a second experiment investigating the relationship between the animacy level and ERP amplitude through parameter design,so as to verify the causality thereof.Results showed that LPP amplitude evoked by real faces in the forehead is more positive than those of doll faces,and there were no differences between PI and N170 component.Also,we found that when the animacy level changed,the LPP amplitude changed too.from which an inverted u-shape modulation was observed.The current study confirmed that LPP is an effective index of detecting animacy in face.