A pilot fMRI study for understanding the facial perception of 3D human faces

The human face is one of the most powerful communication tools, especially when people meet for the first time. Facial perception can be influenced by many factors. Although fMRI has been used to study the neural mechanisms when people look at pictures, how people perceive facial stimuli under different movements has not been studied in detail. In this pilot study, adult participants were scanned with a block design of static faces, dynamic faces, and corresponding scrambled face stimuli with a one-back task for attention. The activation of the right fusiform face area (FFA) validates the setting of this facial perception experiment. The dynamic nature of facial movements engages primary visual cortex V1 and other visual areas, resulting in heightened neural activity compared to static faces, as they analyze and extract information from the changing visual inputs. This result provides new insights for further research work in the neural activities related to dynamic face processing.