Positivity can cue familiarity

Given that familiarity is closely associated with positivity, the authors sought evidence for the idea that positivity would increase perceived familiarity. In Experiment 1, smiling and thus positively perceived novel faces were significantly more likely to be incorrectly judged as familiar than novel faces with neutral expressions. In Experiment 2, subliminal association with positive affect (a positively valenced prime) led to false recognition of novel words as familiar. In Experiment 3, validity judgments, known to be influenced by familiarity, were more likely to occur if participants were in happy mood states than neutral mood states. Despite their different paradigms and approaches, the results of these three studies converge on the idea that, at least under certain circumstances, the experience of positivity itself can signal familiarity, perhaps because the experience of familiarity is typically positive.     

Demonstrating the acquired familiarity of faces by using a gender-decision task

We report an experiment in which participants made gender judgments (male or female) to faces. There were three groups of faces: unfamiliar, familiar (celebrities), and a set which had been learned earlier by the participants during the experimental session. The principal purpose of this study was to establish an indirect measure of assessing whether faces have become familiar through learning that does not require overt recognition. Bruce and Young's (1986 British Journal of Psychology 77 305-327) model of face recognition suggests face-processing tasks are independent of one another and so familiarity should have no impact on the time taken to perform gender decisions. However, recent studies have suggested that some face processes are not completely independent. A gender judgment is a simple task which would be useful in face-learning experiments. We examined whether exposure to previously novel faces facilitates a later gender decision to those faces. During a learning stage, participants viewed a set of unfamiliar faces. At test, participants were able to assign gender faster to previously familiar (famous) faces and learned faces than they were to unfamiliar faces. Therefore familiarity can influence the speed at which gender is analysed. We explain our findings with reference to the Burton et al (1990 British Journal of Psychology 81 361-380) interactive activation and competition (IAC) model of face recognition and discuss how the gender judgment might be employed as a means of tracking the acquisition of familiarity in face-learning studies.     

The warm glow heuristic: when liking leads to familiarity

Five studies demonstrate that the positive valence of a stimulus increases its perceived familiarity, even in the absence of prior exposure. For example, beautiful faces feel familiar. Two explanations for this effect stand out: (a). Stimulus prototypicality leads both to positivity and familiarity, and (b). positive affect is used to infer familiarity in a heuristic fashion. Studies 1 and 2 show that attractive faces feel more familiar than average ones and that prototypicality accounts for only part of this effect. In Study 3, the rated attractiveness of average faces was manipulated by contrast, and their perceived familiarity changed accordingly, although their inherent prototypicaliry remained the same. In Study 4, positive words felt more familiar to participants than neutral and negative words. Study 5 shows that the effect is strongest when recognition is difficult. The author concludes that both prototypicality and a warm glow heuristic are responsible for the "good-is-familiar" phenomenon.     

Demonstrating how unfamiliar faces become familiar using a face matching task

Two experiments examine a novel method of assessing face familiarity that does not require explicit identification of presented faces. Earlier research (Clutterbuck & Johnston, 2002; Young, Hay, McWeeny, Flude, & Ellis, 1985) has shown that different views of the same face can be matched more quickly for familiar than for unfamiliar faces. This study examines whether exposure to previously novel faces allows the speed with which they can be matched to be increased, thus allowing a means of assessing how faces become familiar. In Experiment 1, participants viewed two sets of unfamiliar faces presented for either many, short intervals or for few, long intervals. At test, previously familiar (famous) faces were matched more quickly than novel faces or learned faces. In addition, learned faces seen on many, brief occasions were matched more quickly than the novel faces or faces seen on fewer, longer occasions. However, this was only observed when participants performed “different” decision matches. In Experiment 2, the similarity between face pairs was controlled more strictly. Once again, matches were performed on familiar faces more quickly than on unfamiliar or learned items. However, matches made to learned faces were significantly faster than those made to completely novel faces. This was now observed for both same and different match decisions. The use of this matching task as a means of tracking how unfamiliar faces become familiar is discussed.     

Exposure effects in person perception: Familiarity,similarity, and attraction

Two experiments explored the relationship between familiarity, similarity, and attraction. In the first experiment, subjects viewed photographs of faces at various exposure frequencies and then rated them for likeableness and similarity. Familiar people were regarded by the subjects as both more likeable and more similar to themselves. The effects of familiarity on perceived similarity were primarily mediated by changes in attraction, although some evidence of a direct link between familiarity and perceived similarity was also found. In the second experiment, subjects viewed the same stimuli at a single exposure frequency, and received bogus information regarding the similarity of the people shown therein. Subsequent ratings of likeableness and perceived familiarity revealed that people who seemed similar to the subjects were regarded as both more likeable and more familiar. The effects of similarity on perceived familiarity were almost entirely mediated by changes in attraction. Some of the theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Role of Face Familiarity in Judgments of Personality and Intelligence

Personality judgments based on facial features are a common occurrence. The face familiarity overgeneralization hypothesis states that people make judgments of unknown faces based on their similarity to known faces. However, there is a dearth of research regarding how face familiarity relates to perceptions of personality and intelligence in strangers. The current article used two studies to provide evidence for the relationship between face familiarity and judgments of personality and intelligence. Study 1 showed that photographs perceived as familiar by one set of participants were rated more positively regarding personality and intelligence by a second group of participants. Study 2 found that high perceived familiarity resulted in positive judgments of personality and intelligence, whereas familiarity based on exposure did not. These findings indicate both that perceived familiarity significantly impacts positive judgments of personality and intelligence and that the face familiarity overgeneralization hypothesis is a useful framework for this area of research.     

The effect of familiarity on face adaptation

Face aftereffects can provide information on how faces are stored by the human visual system (eg Leopold et al, 2001 Nature Neuroscience 4 89-94), but few studies have used robustly represented (highly familiar) faces. In this study we investigated the influence of facial familiarity on adaptation effects. Participants were adapted to a series of distorted faces (their own face, a famous face, or an unfamiliar face). In experiment 1, figural aftereffects were significantly smaller when participants were adapted to their own face than when they were adapted to the other faces (ie their own face appeared significantly less distorted than a famous or unfamiliar face). Experiment 2 showed that this 'own-face' effect did not occur when the same faces were used as adaptation stimuli for participants who were unfamiliar with them. Experiment 3 replicated experiment 1, but included a pre-adaptation baseline. The results highlight the importance of considering facial familiarity when conducting research on face aftereffects.     

Emotional Conception: How Embodied Emotion Concepts Guide Perception and Facial Action

ABSTRACT— This study assessed embodied simulation via electromyography (EMG) as participants first encoded emotionally ambiguous faces with emotion concepts (i.e., "angry,""happy") and later passively viewed the faces without the concepts. Memory for the faces was also measured. At initial encoding, participants displayed more smiling-related EMG activity in response to faces paired with "happy" than in response to faces paired with "angry." Later, in the absence of concepts, participants remembered happiness-encoded faces as happier than anger-encoded faces. Further, during passive reexposure to the ambiguous faces, participants' EMG indicated spontaneous emotion-specific mimicry, which in turn predicted memory bias. No specific EMG activity was observed when participants encoded or viewed faces with non-emotion-related valenced concepts, or when participants encoded or viewed Chinese ideographs. From an embodiment perspective, emotion simulation is a measure of what is currently perceived. Thus, these findings provide evidence of genuine concept-driven changes in emotion perception. More generally, the findings highlight embodiment's role in the representation and processing of emotional information.     

Tolerance for distorted faces: Challenges to a configural processing account of familiar face recognition

Face recognition is widely held to rely on ‘configural processing’, an analysis of spatial relations between facial features. We present three experiments in which viewers were shown distorted faces, and asked to resize these to their correct shape. Based on configural theories appealing to metric distances between features, we reason that this should be an easier task for familiar than unfamiliar faces (whose subtle arrangements of features are unknown). In fact, participants were inaccurate at this task, making between 8% and 13% errors across experiments. Importantly, we observed no advantage for familiar faces: in one experiment participants were more accurate with unfamiliars, and in two experiments there was no difference. These findings were not due to general task difficulty – participants were able to resize blocks of colour to target shapes (squares) more accurately. We also found an advantage of familiarity for resizing other stimuli (brand logos). If configural processing does underlie face recognition, these results place constraints on the definition of ‘configural’. Alternatively, familiar face recognition might rely on more complex criteria – based on tolerance to within-person variation rather than highly specific measurement.     

Effects of familiarity on the perceptual integrality of the identity and expression of faces: the parallel-route hypothesis revisited

The effects of familiarity on selective attention for the identity and expression of faces were tested using Garner's speeded-classification task. In 2 experiments, participants classified expression (or identity) of familiar and unfamiliar faces while the irrelevant dimension of identity (or expression) was either held constant (baseline condition) or varied randomly (filtering condition). Selective attention was measured by the difference in performance between these 2 conditions. Failure of selective attention was larger for familiar than for unfamiliar faces. In addition, failure of selective attention was found both for identity and for expression judgments. These findings show that familiarity increases (he perceptual integrality between identity and expression, and they question previous studies arguing that identity judgments are always resistant to irrelevant variations in expression. The authors suggest that the systems processing identity and expression are interconnected in that facial identity serves as a reference from which expressions can be more easily derived.     

Matching as an index of face familiarity

An experiment is reported which explores a method of assessing familiarity that does not rely on the overt recognition or identification of faces. Earlier findings (Clutterbuck & Johnston, 2002; Young, Hay, McWeeny, Flude, & Ellis, 1985) have shown that familiar faces can be matched faster on their internal features than unfamiliar faces. This study examines whether familiarization in the form of repeated exposure to novel faces over a 2 day period can facilitate internal feature match performance. Participants viewed each of a set of unfamiliar faces for 1 min in total. At test on the second day previously familiar (famous) faces were matched faster than unfamiliar and familiarized faces. However the familiarized faces were matched faster than the unfamiliar faces. We discuss the use of this task as a means of accessing a measure of familiarity formation and as a means of tracking how faces become familiar.     

The Role of Memory in the Relationship between Affect and Familiarity

Abstract

Two previous studies have demonstrated that stimuli which elicit affect are seen as more familiar than stimuli that elicit little or no affect, but it is not clear why this effect occurs. To begin to understand the effect, the question of whether it is due to improved memory for affect-eliciting stimuli was examined. Recognition judgements were obtained for faces that varied in the strength and valence of affect elicited. Improved memory for affect-eliciting faces was not observed. Instead, the results show a bias to claim recognition for faces that are especially likely to elicit affect, whether or not those faces have been seen before, suggesting that affect can induce a sense of familiarity. The finding of a previous study indicating that both positive and negative affect increase perceived familiarity was replicated. The relevance of the results to an understanding of basic affective processes and processes involved in the assessment of familiarity is discussed. An explanation which can account for the data is proposed.     

How dogs scan familiar and inverted faces: an eye movement study

Faces play an important role in communication and identity recognition in social animals. Domestic dogs often respond to human facial cues, but their face processing is weakly understood. In this study, facial inversion effect (deficits in face processing when the image is turned upside down) and responses to personal familiarity were tested using eye movement tracking. A total of 23 pet dogs and eight kennel dogs were compared to establish the effects of life experiences on their scanning behavior. All dogs preferred conspecific faces and showed great interest in the eye area, suggesting that they perceived images representing faces. Dogs fixated at the upright faces as long as the inverted faces, but the eye area of upright faces gathered longer total duration and greater relative fixation duration than the eye area of inverted stimuli, regardless of the species (dog or human) shown in the image. Personally, familiar faces and eyes attracted more fixations than the strange ones, suggesting that dogs are likely to recognize conspecific and human faces in photographs. The results imply that face scanning in dogs is guided not only by the physical properties of images, but also by semantic factors. In conclusion, in a free-viewing task, dogs seem to target their fixations at naturally salient and familiar items. Facial images were generally more attractive for pet dogs than kennel dogs, but living environment did not affect conspecific preference or inversion and familiarity responses, suggesting that the basic mechanisms of face processing in dogs could be hardwired or might develop under limited exposure.     

Face recognition and emotional valence: processing without awareness by neurologically intact participants does not simulate covert recognition in prosopagnosia

Covert face recognition in neurologically intact participants was investigated with the use of very brief stimulus presentation to prevent awareness of the stimulus. In Experiment 1, skin conductance response (SCR) to photographs of celebrity and unfamiliar faces was recorded; the faces were displayed for 220 msec and for 17 msec in a within-participants design. SCR to faces presented for 220 msec was larger and more likely to occur with familiar faces than with unfamiliar faces. Face familiarity did not affect the SCR to faces presented for 17 msec. SCR was larger for faces of good than for faces of evil celebrities presented for 17 msec, but valence did not affect SCR to faces displayed for 220 msec. In Experiment 2, associative priming was found in a face familiarity decision task when the prime face was displayed for 220 msec, but no facilitation occurred when primes were presented for 17 msec. In Experiment 3, participants were able to differentiate evil and good faces presented without awareness in a two-alternative forced-choice decision. The results provide no evidence of familiarity detection outside awareness in normal participants and suggest that, contrary to previous research, very brief presentation to neurologically intact participants is not a useful model for the types of covert recognition found in prosopagnosia. However, a response based on affective valence appears to be available from brief presentation.     

Spatial judgments of exocentric extents in an open-field situation: familiar versus unfamiliar size.

Carlson and Tassone (1971) found that an object of familiar size presented in an outdoor setting and viewed at an appreciable distance is judged to be more distant than an unfamiliar object. Three experiments examined whether object familiarity also affects spatial judgments of exocentric extents presented under conditions comparable to those of Carlson and Tassone's experiments. The markers of the extents were either familiar or unfamiliar objects. In Experiment 1, subjects reproduced the perceived extents of depth intervals by adjusting a comparison egocentric extent, and in Experiment 2, subjects also compared the relative depths of two equally long extents. In Experiment 3, the two equally long extents were presented in the subjects' frontoparallel plane, and the subjects reported which of these two extents appeared longer and farther away. The results of these experiments indicate that familiar size does not affect the perceived depths or lengths of exocentric extents viewed under naturalistic conditions.     

The impact of COVID-19 concerns on perceiving others' faces

Unlike most infectious diseases, COVID-19 is characterised by an absence of facial disease-signalling cues. Yet, it is still unclear whether it has influenced face perception. Understanding this may help clarify if and how our motivation toward social interactions is conditional on situational pathogen threats. The present study investigated if priming disease concerns about COVID-19 would change people's perception of neutral faces on perceived disease, social discomfort and arousal elicited by such faces; this condition was compared with other infectious/non-infectious diseases and a non-disease priming condition. One-hundred sixty-six participants recruited nationally performed the online task. When compared with the non-disease condition, participants primed for COVID-19 perceived faces as sicker and tended to view them as eliciting more social discomfort; no difference occurred in arousal. No other difference was found between conditions. These findings suggest that the pandemic context can shape how we perceive others' apparent sickness. Overall, these might reflect adaptations intertwined with the behavioural immune system's defence mechanisms.     

面孔熟悉度对面孔性别与表情相互作用的调节

对于面孔性别与表情的关系, 目前的理论尚不完善。而众多研究证据表明, 面孔熟悉度与面孔性别及表情的加工均有密切关系。本研究基于Garner范式考察了在不同面孔熟悉度下面孔性别与表情的相互关系。共包括4项实验：实验1, 面孔刺激的身份陌生且不重复, 刺激在Garner范式的控制组和正交组中均仅呈现一次, 面孔熟悉度低; 实验2, 除面孔刺激的身份重复外, 其余均同实验1, 面孔熟悉度中等; 实验3, 面孔刺激的身份陌生且不重复, 但分别在控制组和正交组中重复呈现多次, 面孔熟悉度高; 实验4, 通过面孔学习增加面孔的熟悉度, 以直接验证面孔熟悉度的增加对面孔性别与表情相互关系的影响。结果发现：对于陌生面孔, 表情单向影响面孔性别的加工; 随着面孔熟悉度的增加, 面孔性别与表情之间出现双向的影响。因此, 面孔熟悉度对面孔性别与表情的相互影响具有调节作用。     

7-11-year-old children show an advantage for matching and recognizing the internal features of familiar faces: Evidence against a developmental shift

Adults are better at recognizing familiar faces from the internal facial features (eyes, nose, mouth) than from the external facial features (hair, face outline). However, previous research suggests that this “internal advantage” does not appear until relatively late in childhood, and some studies suggest that children rely on external features to recognize all faces, whether familiar or not. We use a matching task to examine face processing in 7-8- and 10-11-year-old children. We use a design in which all face stimuli can be used as familiar items (for participants who are classmates) and unfamiliar items (for participants from a different school). Using this design, we find an internal feature advantage for matching familiar faces, for both groups of children. The same children were then shown the external and internal features of their classmates and were asked to name or otherwise identify them. Again, both age groups identified more of their classmates correctly from the internal than the external features. This is the first time an internal advantage has been reported in this age group. Results suggest that children as young as 7 process faces in the same way as do adults, and that once procedural difficulties are overcome, the standard effects of familiarity are observed.     

Beauty is in the ease of the beholding: A neurophysiological test of the averageness theory of facial attractiveness

Hundreds of studies have shown that people prefer attractive over unattractive faces. But what is an attractive face, and why is it preferred? Averageness theory claims that faces are perceived as being attractive when their facial configuration approximates the mathematical average facial configuration of the population. Conversely, faces that deviate from this average configuration are perceived as being unattractive. The theory predicts that both attractive and mathematically averaged faces should be processed more fluently than unattractive faces, whereas the averaged faces should be processed marginally more fluently than the attractive faces. We compared neurocognitive and behavioral responses to attractive, unattractive, and averaged human faces to test these predictions. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) and reaction times (RTs) from 48 adults while they discriminated between human and chimpanzee faces. The participants categorized averaged and high-attractive faces as being “human” faster than low-attractive faces. The posterior N170 (150–225 ms) face-evoked ERP component was smaller in response to high-attractive and averaged faces than to low-attractive faces. Single-trial electroencephalographic analysis indicated that this reduced ERP response arose from the engagement of fewer neural resources, and not from a change in the temporal consistency of how those resources were engaged. These findings provide novel evidence that faces are perceived as being attractive when they approximate a facial configuration close to the population average, and they suggest that processing fluency underlies preferences for attractive faces.     

Spatial judgments of exocentric extents in an open-field situation: Familiar versus unfamiliar size

Carlson and Tassone (1971) found that an object of familiar size presented in an outdoor setting and viewed at an appreciable distance is judged to be more distant than an unfamiliar object. Three experiments examined whether object familiarity also affects spatial judgments of exocentric extents presented under conditions comparable to those of Carlson and Tassone’s experiments. The markers of the extents were either familiar or unfamiliar objects. In Experiment 1, subjects reproduced the perceived extents of depth intervals by adjusting a comparison egocentric extent, and in Experiment 2, subjects also compared the relative depths of two equally long extents. In Experiment 3, the two equally long extents were presented in the subjects’ frontoparallel plane, and the subjects reported which of these two extents appeared longer and farther away. The results of these experiments indicate that familiar size does not affect the perceived depths or lengths of exocentric extents viewed under naturalistic conditions.