Love and friendship at first sight: Rapid neural representations of personal relevance

Faces are a primary source of social information, but little is known about the sequence of neural processing of personally relevant faces, such as those of our loved ones. We applied representational similarity analyses to EEG-fMRI measurement of neural responses to faces of personal relevance to participants - their romantic partner and a friend - compared to a stranger. Faces expressed fear, happiness or no emotion. Shared EEG-fMRI representations started 100ms after stimulus onset not only in visual cortex, but also regions involved in social cognition, value representation and autobiographical memory, including ventromedial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction and posterior cingulate. According to established models of face recognition, these activations precede the stage of structural face encoding at around 170 ms after stimulus onset. Representations in fusiform gyrus, amygdala, insular cortex and N. accumbens were evident after 200 ms. Representations related to romantic love emerged after 400ms in subcortical brain regions associated with reward. Our results point to the prioritized processing of personal relevance with extensive cortical representation as soon as 100 ms after stimulus onset; preceding the stage of structural face encoding.