The importance of conceptual knowledge when learning new faces during naturalistic viewing

Although the ability to recognise familiar faces is a critical part of everyday life, the process by which a face becomes familiar in the real world is not fully understood. Previous studies have focussed on the importance of perceptual experience with faces. However, in natural viewing, perceptual experience with faces is accompanied by increased knowledge about the person and the context in which they are encountered. Here, we used a natural viewing paradigm to investigate how the context in which events are presented affects subsequent face recognition. Participants viewed clips from the TV show Life on Mars, where context was manipulated by presenting events either in 1) the original sequence, or 2) a scrambled sequence. While the manipulation significantly affected the understanding of the events, it had no effect on the perceptual exposure to the faces. Nevertheless, we found that recognition of faces was greater in participants from the original group compared to the scrambled group. Moreover, individual differences in conceptual understanding correlated with face recognition. Next, we investigated how our understanding of conceptual information is reflected in the brain. After having previously seen either the original or scrambled version of the movie, participants now viewed a new movie from Life on Mars while neural activity was recorded using fMRI. Inter-subject correlation (ISC) was used to measure the similarity of the response across participants in the original or scrambled groups. We found higher ISCs between participants in the original group within a network of regions that are typically associated with the processing of semantic, episodic and affective information. Together, these findings suggest that conceptual information is important for learning new faces and that the neural correlates are evident in a distributed response across a network of regions beyond the visual brain.