Rapid Neural Representations of Personally Relevant Faces

The faces of those most personally relevant to us are our primary source of social information, making their timely perception a priority. Recent research indicates that gender, age and identity of faces can be decoded from EEG/MEG data within 100 ms. Yet, the time course and neural circuitry involved in representing the personal relevance of faces remain unknown. We applied simultaneous EEG-fMRI to examine neural responses to emotional faces of female participants' romantic partners, friends, and a stranger. Combining EEG and fMRI in cross-modal representational similarity analyses, we provide evidence that representations of personal relevance start prior to structural encoding at 100 ms, with correlated representations in visual cortex, but also in prefrontal and midline regions involved in value representation, and monitoring and recall of self-relevant information. Our results add to an emerging body of research that suggests that models of face perception need to be updated to account for rapid detection of personal relevance in cortical circuitry beyond the core face processing network.