Associative relations in instrumental learning: The eighteenth Bartlett memorial lecture

Instrumental learning involves three primary events: a stimulus (S), a response (R), and an outcome (O). Evidence is reviewed indicating the presence of binary associations among those events, as well as a hierarchical structure of the form S-(R-O). Experiments examining the conditions that produce learning, the content of the learning once it has occurred, and the way learning maps into performance all suggest the presence of such a hierarchical structure.     

The role of identification in the resolution of trauma: the Anna Freud memorial lecture

In studies on the consequences of trauma, identifications have too often been overlooked. Trauma is experienced as an assault and can lead to an automatic, unconscious identification with the aggressor. Trauma is associated with a constellation of identifications, including identification with the aggressor, with the victim, with the rescuer, and with the caregiver. Identifications are important for the recovery from and mastery of trauma.     

The entry point of face recognition: evidence for face expertise.

Previous studies have shown that experts (e.g., birdwatchers) are as fast to recognize objects at subordinate levels of abstraction (e.g., robin) as they are to recognize the same object at the basic level (e.g., bird). As a test of face expertise, the current study found that adults identify faces more frequently (Experiment 1) and as quickly (Experiment 2) at the subordinate level (e.g., Bill Clinton) as at the basic level (e.g., human). Whereas brief presentation (75 ms) impaired subordinate-level recognition of nonface objects, it did not impair the subordinate level recognition of faces (Experiment 3). Finally, in an identity-matching task, subordinate-level primes facilitated the matching responses of faces but not nonface objects (Experiment 4). Collectively, these results indicate that face expertise, like expert object expertise, promotes a downward shift in recognition to more subordinate levels of abstraction.     

The twelfth Bartlett memorial lecture: The role of single neurons in the psychology of perception

I feel deeply honoured by your invitation to give the Bartlett lecture, and am especially glad to do so in Holland, the home of so many distinguished psychologists of sensation and perception. And there is a third reason why it has given me much pleasure, for Sir Frederick Bartlett was one of those who had an important influence on the direction of my career some 40 years ago. I had to decide whether to spend my last year at Cambridge reading psychology or physiology, so I attended a short course of introductory lectures he gave in July. About half a dozen of us sat on upright wooden chairs circled around him as he sat in an armchair, smiling benignly. The first thing he did was to tell us to close our notebooks, for he was not going to say anything that would help us to pass any exams. And I believe the very last words of his last lecture were, “So you see it is all very difficult”. I was very glad he said that, for I had in fact found it all very heavy going: my brain seemed always to be lost in clouds of uncertainty when “remembering”, “thinking”, or “perceiving” were mentioned, because there was no conceptual framework for these processes except the words themselves and others spun around them. What I was looking for were the definable quantities of physics, chemistry and even physiology, these I could handle conceptually in their geometric and functional interactions, whereas I always find a purely verbal argument about abstractions difficult to follow and impossible to believe. So this lack of any nonverbal conceptual framework was very painful.

There was one phrase I think I recall him using that particularly aroused my interest-“the effort after meaning”; intuitively this seemed to be very important, but however much effort I made the meaning never quite emerged. I had almost decided that my mistrust of words made me unsuited to a career in psychology, but all the same I put my problem about “physiology or psychology” directly to Bartlett. After finding out that I was mainly interested in problems of sensation and perception, he said he thought that E. D. Adrian's research over the last 20 years had made more difference to that subject than any results obtained from within psychology itself.     

Development of voice recognition: parallels with face recognition.

Encoding and subsequent recognition of unfamiliar voices was examined in children, aged 6 to 16, and in adults. Performance changed markedly with age, improving sharply between ages 6 and 10, with 10-year-olds approaching adult levels. After age 10 accuracy declined significantly but returned to the adult level by age 14. The course of development closely matches that recently documented for the ability to encode and recognize unfamiliar faces. Several parallels between voice recognition and face recognition are discussed.     

Research on face recognition: The Aberdeen influence

The review of ‘Recognizing faces’ by Hadyn Ellis, published in the British Journal of Psychology in 1975, marked the genesis of a distinct field of research. This seminal review sprang from a broader programme of research on face recognition conducted at the University of Aberdeen, whose influence continues to be felt in what has become an internationally important research area. We discuss the background to the Aberdeen research, summarize some of its achievements, and offer reasons why it proved so successful. These reasons include the synergy between theory and practice‐based studies, the value of combining different perspectives and sources of evidence, sound techniques that led to easily reproducible findings, and the emphasis on testing even the most ‘common sense’ assumptions.     

The social face of emotion recognition: Evaluations versus stereotypes

The goal of the present paper was to demonstrate the influence of general evaluations and stereotype associations on emotion recognition. Earlier research has shown that evaluative connotations between social category members and emotional expression predict whether recognition of positive or negative emotional expressions will be facilitated (e.g. Hugenberg, 2005). In the current paper we tested the hypothesis that stereotype associations influence emotion recognition processes, especially when the difference between valences of emotional expressions does not come into play. In line with this notion, when participants in the present two studies were asked to classify positive versus negative emotional expressions (i.e. happy versus anger, or happy versus sadness), valence congruency effects were found. Importantly, however, in a comparative context without differences in valence in which participants were asked to classify two distinct negative emotions (i.e. anger versus sadness) we found that recognition facilitation occurred for stereotypically associated discrete emotional expressions. With this, the current results indicate that a distinction between general evaluative and cognitive routes can be made in emotion recognition processes.     

The role of eyebrows in face recognition

A fundamental challenge in face recognition lies in determining which facial characteristics are important in the identification of faces. Several studies have indicated the significance of certain facial features in this regard, particularly internal ones such as the eyes and mouth. Surprisingly, however, one rather prominent facial feature has received little attention in this domain: the eyebrows. Past work has examined the role of eyebrows in emotional expression and nonverbal communication, as well as in facial aesthetics and sexual dimorphism. However, it has not been made clear whether the eyebrows play an important role in the identification of faces. Here, we report experimental results which suggest that for face recognition the eyebrows may be at least as influential as the eyes. Specifically, we find that the absence of eyebrows in familiar faces leads to a very large and significant disruption in recognition performance. In fact, a significantly greater decrement in face recognition is observed in the absence of eyebrows than in the absence of eyes. These results may have important implications for our understanding of the mechanisms of face recognition in humans as well as for the development of artificial face-recognition systems.     

The neural plasticity of other-race face recognition

Although it is well established that people are better at recognizing own-race faces than at recognizing other-race faces, the neural mechanisms mediating this advantage are not well understood. In this study, Caucasian participants were trained to differentiate African American (or Hispanic) faces at the individual level (e.g., Joe, Bob) and to categorize Hispanic (or African American) faces at the basic level of race (e.g., Hispanic, African American). Behaviorally, subordinate-level individuation training led to improved performance on a posttraining recognition test, relative to basic-level training. As measured by event-related potentials, subordinate- and basic-level training had relatively little effect on the face N170 component. However, as compared with basic-level training, subordinate-level training elicited an increased response in the posterior expert N250 component. These results demonstrate that learning to discriminate other-race faces at the subordinate level of the individual leads to improved recognition and enhanced activation of the expert N250 component.     

The effect of educational priming on face recognition from a silver alert

Abstract

In a between-subjects’ experimental design, we manipulated whether participants viewed an educational video on the importance of Silver Alerts before viewing an older Caucasian female in a Silver Alert. We also examined associations of target recognition with individual difference variables, including gender, ethnicity, Attitudes Towards Older People (ATOP), empathy, conscientiousness, as well as contact and experience with older adults. The results showed an advantage of the priming condition compared to the no-priming condition for correctly identifying the missing woman. Additionally, females correctly identified the missing woman more than males, and Caucasian participants correctly identified the missing woman more than African American participants. Lastly, participants who reported more experience with older adults were more likely to recognize the missing woman. The results suggest that preceding Silver Alerts with information about their importance may increase their effectiveness. Further research is needed to investigate how individual difference variables relate to recognition of missing senior citizens.     

Face value: testing the utility of contextual face cues for face recognition

The presence of multiple faces during a crime may provide a naturally-occurring contextual cue to support eyewitness recognition for those faces later. Across two experiments, we sought to investigate mechanisms underlying previously-reported cued recognition effects, and to determine whether such effects extended to encoding conditions involving more than two faces. Participants studied sets of individual faces, pairs of faces, or groups of four faces. At test, participants in the single-face condition were tested only on those individual faces without cues. Participants in the two and four-face conditions were tested using no cues, correct cues (a face previously studied with the target test face), or incorrect cues (a never-before-seen face). In Experiment 2, associative encoding was promoted by a rating task. Neither hit rates nor false-alarm rates were significantly affected by cue type or face encoding condition in Experiment 1, but cuing of any kind (correct or incorrect) in Experiment 2 appeared to provide a protective buffer to reduce false-alarm rates through a less liberal response bias. Results provide some evidence that cued recognition techniques could be useful to reduce false recognition, but only when associative encoding is strong.     

The prototype effect in face recognition: Extension and limits

The prototype effect in face recognition refers to a tendency to recognize the face corresponding to the central value of a series of seen faces, even when this central value or prototype has not been seen. Five experiments investigated the extension and limits of this phenomenon. In all the experiments, participants saw a series of faces, each one in two or more different versions or exemplars, and then performed a recognition test, including seen and unseen exemplars and the unseen prototype face. In Experiment 1, a strong prototype effect for variations in feature location was demonstrated in oldness ratings and in a standard old/new recognition test. Experiments 2A and 2B compared the prototype effect for variations in feature location and variations in head angle and showed that, for the latter, the prototype effect was weaker and more dependent on similarity than for the former. These results suggest that recognition across feature variations is based on an averaging mechanism, whereas recognition across viewpoint variations is based on an approximation mechanism. Experiments 3A and 3B examined the limits of the prototype effect using a face morphing technique that allows a systematic manipulation of face similarity. The results indicated that, as the similarity between face exemplars decreases to the level of similarity between the faces of different individuals, the prototype effect starts to disappear. At the same time, the prototype effect may originate false memories of faces that were never seen.