Looking for a face in the crowd: Fixation-related potentials in an eye-movement visual search task

Despite the compelling contribution of the study of event related potentials (ERPs) and eye movements to cognitive neuroscience, these two approaches have largely evolved independently. We designed an eye-movement visual search paradigm that allowed us to concurrently record EEG and eye movements while subjects were asked to find a hidden target face in a crowded scene with distractor faces. Fixation event-related potentials (fERPs) to target and distractor stimuli showed the emergence of robust sensory components associated with the perception of stimuli and cognitive components associated with the detection of target faces. We compared those components with the ones obtained in a control task at fixation: qualitative similarities as well as differences in terms of scalp topography and latency emerged between the two. By using single trial analyses, fixations to target and distractors could be decoded from the EEG signals above chance level in 11 out of 12 subjects. Our results show that EEG signatures related to cognitive behavior develop across spatially unconstrained exploration of natural scenes and provide a first step towards understanding the mechanisms of target detection during natural search.Fil: Kaunitz, Lisandro N.. University of Leicester; Reino UnidoFil: Kamienkowski, Juan Esteban. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física. Laboratorio de Neurociencia Integrativa; Argentina. Universidad Diego Portales; Chile;Fil: Varatharajah, Alexander. University of Leicester; Reino UnidoFil: Sigman, Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Física del Sur; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física. Laboratorio de Neurociencia Integrativa; ArgentinaFil: Quian Quiroga, Rodrigo. University of Leicester; Reino UnidoFil: Ison, Matias Julian. University of Leicester; Reino Unid