Facial Identity Recognition Training for fMRI

Before scanning, all participants were placed in a mock MR scanner for ∼20 min and practiced lying still. This procedure is highly effective at acclimating participants to the scanner environment and minimizing motion artifact and anxiety (Scherf et al., 2015 (link)). During this mock scanning session, participants engaged in a practice version of the scanner recognition task and encoded four exemplars of each of the target male and female identities. An adult male face and an adult female face were presented side-by-side and labeled as “John” and “Jane.” Participants were given 10 seconds to encode the faces. Following this, participants engaged in four practice blocks of the task (two male and two female) using novel exemplar and distractor faces. The task involved looking at blocks of 12 sequentially presented faces and identifying the two target identities among 10 distractor faces. No stimuli from the practice task were used in the scanner task (see below).
Participants were scanned using a Siemens 3T Trio MRI with a 12-channel phase array head coil at the Social, Life, and Engineering Imaging Center (SLEIC) at Penn State University. During the scanning session, visual stimuli were displayed on a rear-projection screen located inside the MR scanner.