Abstract

When we encounter people in real life, increased visual experience with their face is accompanied by an accumulation of conceptual knowledge about them. This conceptual knowledge has been shown to play an important role in face recognition. However, the extent to which conceptual knowledge influences neural responses to faces in visual or non-visual regions of the brain is not clear. To address this question, participants (male and female) learned faces in a naturalistic viewing paradigm in which conceptual information was modulated by presenting a movie to participants in either its original sequence, or a scrambled sequence. Although participants in both groups had the same overall perceptual experience, this manipulation had a significant effect on the conceptual understanding of events. After a delay, participants viewed a new movie featuring the previously learned faces while neural activity was measured using fMRI. No significant differences were observed between the Original and Scrambled groups in core face-selective regions of the visual brain. This aligns with the fact that overall exposure to faces was consistent across groups, ensuring that our manipulation did not impact visual processing of faces. In contrast, differences between the groups were evident within a network of regions that are typically associated with processing person knowledge. This network of regions was also able to discriminate the identity of the key characters based on the response to the faces. These findings provide important insights into the level of neural processing at which conceptual knowledge influences familiar face recognition during natural viewing.

Significance statement The ability to recognize faces relies on the depth of processing during encoding, not just perceptual exposure. Associating faces with conceptual information enhances recognition by fostering deeper processing. However, the neural level at which this occurs remains unclear. One possibility is that conceptual information strengthens visual representations; alternatively, it may directly influence non-visual regions involved in processing person knowledge. Using a naturalistic movie-viewing paradigm, this study found consistent neural responses in visual regions regardless of conceptual coherence. However, a network linked to person recognition showed significant effects of conceptual knowledge. These findings provide new insights into how real-world learning integrates perceptual and conceptual information, enriching our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying face recognition.