A decisional space account of saccadic reaction times towards personally familiar faces

Abstract Manual and saccadic reaction times (SRTs) have been used to determine the minimum time required for different types of visual categorizations. Such studies have demonstrated that faces can be detected within natural scenes within as little as 100ms (Crouzet, Kirchner & Thorpe, 2010), while increasingly complex decisions require longer processing times (Besson, Barragan-Jason, Thorpe, Fabre-Thorpe, Puma et al., 2017). Following the notion that facial representations stored in memory facilitate perceptual processing (Ramon & Gobbini, 2018), a recent study reported 180ms as the fastest speed at which “familiar face detection” based on expressed choice saccades (Visconti di Ollegio Castello & Gobbini, 2015). At first glance, these findings seem incompatible with the earliest neural markers of familiarity reported in electrophysiological studies (Barragan-Jason, Cauchoix & Barbeau, 2015; Caharel, Ramon & Rossion, 2014; Huang, Wu, Hu, Wang, Ding & Qu et al., 2017), which should temporally precede any overtly observed behavioral (oculomotor or manual) categorization. Here, we reason that this apparent discrepancy could be accounted for in terms of decisional space constraints, which modulate both manual RTs observed for different levels of visual processing (Besson et al., 2017), as well as saccadic RTs (SRTs) in both healthy observers and neurological patients (Ramon, in press;Ramon, Sokhn, Lao & Caldara, in press). In the present study, over 70 observers completed three different SRT experiments in which decisional space was manipulated through task demands and stimulus probability. Subjects performed a gender categorization task, or one of two familiar face “recognition” tasks, which differed with respect to the number of personally familiar identities presented (3 vs. 7). We observe an inverse relationship between visual categorization proficiency and decisional space. Observers were most accurate for categorization of gender, which could be achieved in as little as 140ms. Categorization of highly predictable targets was more error-prone and required an additional ~100ms processing time. Our findings add to increasing evidence that pre-activation of identity-information can modulate early visual processing in a top-down manner. They also emphasize the importance of considering procedural aspects as well as terminology when aiming to characterize cognitive processes.