Lateralised processing of the internal and the external facial features of personally familiar and unfamiliar faces: a visual half-field study

In this visual half field (VHF) experiment, we investigated possible differences between the left and the right hemisphere in the processing of the internal and external features of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Previous studies using famous and unknown faces had indicated that both hemispheres use the same qualitative mode of processing with the internal features being more important for the perception of familiar faces. In this experiment, personally familiar faces rather than famous faces are used. There are several, mainly methodological, reasons why personally familiar faces are more appropriate stimuli to investigate face processing. The results of the present study showed that no overall visual field effect occurred, but more importantly, that face processing in the left hemisphere differed qualitatively from that in the right hemisphere. The theoretical repercussions of these findings are discussed.     

The importance of internal facial features in learning new faces

For familiar faces, the internal features (eyes, nose, and mouth) are known to be differentially salient for recognition compared to external features such as hairstyle. Two experiments are reported that investigate how this internal feature advantage accrues as a face becomes familiar. In Experiment 1, we tested the contribution of internal and external features to the ability to generalize from a single studied photograph to different views of the same face. A recognition advantage for the internal features over the external features was found after a change of viewpoint, whereas there was no internal feature advantage when the same image was used at study and test. In Experiment 2, we removed the most salient external feature (hairstyle) from studied photographs and looked at how this affected generalization to a novel viewpoint. Removing the hair from images of the face assisted generalization to novel viewpoints, and this was especially the case when photographs showing more than one viewpoint were studied. The results suggest that the internal features play an important role in the generalization between different images of an individual's face by enabling the viewer to detect the common identity-diagnostic elements across non-identical instances of the face.     

The inversion effect in infancy: the role of internal and external features

The present work examined the changing role of inner and outer facial features in the recognition of upright and inverted faces in 5-, 7-, and 9-month-olds. Study 1 established that the “inversion effect” (impaired recognition of an inverted face) was present in infants as young as 5 months. In Study 2, internal and external features were inverted separately. Disrupting the internal configuration by inversion impaired recognition at all ages; disrupting the external configuration impaired recognition only at 5-months. In Study 3, an upright familiar face was paired with one having either novel internal or novel external features. The results confirmed that the 5-month-olds used only the external features to recognize faces, whereas older infants were as adept at using internal features as external ones. These findings suggest a shift, after 5 months, away from dependence on external features for face recognition and toward greater reliance on internal ones.     

The movement of internal facial features elicits 7 to 8‐month‐old infants' preference for face patterns

A preference for static face patterns is observed in newborns and disappears around 3 months after birth. A previous study has demonstrated that 5‐month‐old infants prefer schematic faces only when the internal features are moving, suggesting that face‐specific movement enhances infants' preference. The present study investigates the facilitative effect of the movement of internal facial features on infants' preference. To examine infants' preference, we used animated face patterns consisting of a head‐shaped contour and three disk blobs. The inner blobs expanded and contracted to represent the opening and closing of the eyes and mouth, and were constrained to open and close only in a biologically possible vertical direction resembling the facial muscle structure. We compared infants' preferential looking time for this vertically moving (VM) face pattern with their looking time for a horizontally moving (HM) face pattern in which blobs transformed at the same speed in a biologically impossible, horizontal direction. In Experiment 1, 7 to 8‐month‐olds preferred the VM to the HM, but 5 to 6‐month‐olds did not. However, the preference was diminished in both cases when the moving face patterns were presented without contour (Experiment 2). Our results suggest that internal facial features with vertical movements promote face preference in 7 to 8‐month‐olds. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Developmental changes in the recognition of faces and facial features

The view that, as children get older, there is a decline in the use of feature‐based forms of face processing to more configurational forms of processing was examined by asking 6‐year‐old and 9‐year‐old children to judge which of two photographs matches an identical probe photograph. The probe and test stimuli were either photographs of whole faces or photographs of isolated facial features. Within this standard method, the stimuli also systematically varied in terms of the familiarity of the faces shown and in the orientation of presentation, both factors that have been interpreted as effecting configurational encoding. A number of age‐related effects are observed: (a) older children are better at recognizing whole faces than younger children, (b) older children exhibit a clear face inversion effect with whole faces while the younger children are equally adept at identifying upright and inverted whole faces, and (c) analysis of the recognition rates associated with the individual features reveals that younger children are better than older children when asked to recognize eye regions. It is argued that the data support the view that as children get older there is a change in the forms of piecemeal encoding employed and an increase in configurational processing. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Similarity and difference in the processing of same- and other-race faces as revealed by eye tracking in 4- to 9-month-olds

Fixation duration for same-race (i.e., Asian) and other-race (i.e., Caucasian) female faces by Asian infant participants between 4 and 9 months of age was investigated with an eye-tracking procedure. The age range tested corresponded with prior reports of processing differences between same- and other-race faces observed in behavioral looking time studies, with preference for same-race faces apparent at 3 months of age and recognition memory differences in favor of same-race faces emerging between 3 and 9 months of age. The eye-tracking results revealed both similarity and difference in infants’ processing of own- and other-race faces. There was no overall fixation time difference between same race and other race for the whole face stimuli. In addition, although fixation time was greater for the upper half of the face than for the lower half of the face and trended higher on the right side of the face than on the left side of the face, face race did not impact these effects. However, over the age range tested, there was a gradual decrement in fixation time on the internal features of other-race faces and a maintenance of fixation time on the internal features of same-race faces. Moreover, the decrement in fixation time for the internal features of other-race faces was most prominent on the nose. The findings suggest that (a) same-race preferences may be more readily evidenced in paired comparison testing formats, (b) the behavioral decline in recognition memory for other-race faces corresponds in timing with a decline in fixation on the internal features of other-race faces, and (c) the center of the face (i.e., the nose) is a differential region for processing same- versus other-race faces by Asian infants.     

Task effects, performance levels, features, configurations, and holistic face processing: A reply to Rossion

A recent article in Acta Psychologica (“Picture-plane inversion leads to qualitative changes of face perception” by Rossion [Rossion, B. (2008). Picture-plane inversion leads to qualitative changes of face perception. Acta Psychologica (Amst), 128(2), 274-289]) criticized several aspects of an earlier paper of ours [Riesenhuber, M., Jarudi, I., Gilad, S., & Sinha, P. (2004). Face processing in humans is compatible with a simple shape-based model of vision. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B (Supplements), 271, S448-S450]. We here address Rossion’s criticisms and correct some misunderstandings. To frame the discussion, we first review our previously presented computational model of face recognition in cortex [Jiang, X., Rosen, E., Zeffiro, T., Vanmeter, J., Blanz, V., & Riesenhuber, M. (2006). Evaluation of a shape-based model of human face discrimination using FMRI and behavioral techniques. Neuron, 50(1), 159-172] that provides a concrete biologically plausible computational substrate for holistic coding, namely a neural representation learned for upright faces, in the spirit of the original simple-to-complex hierarchical model of vision by Hubel and Wiesel. We show that Rossion’s and others’ data support the model, and that there is actually a convergence of views on the mechanisms underlying face recognition, in particular regarding holistic processing.     

The own-age face recognition bias in children and adults

Children recognize children's faces more accurately than adult faces, and adults recognize adult faces more accurately than children's faces (e.g., Anastasi & Rhodes, 2005 Anastasi, J. S. and Rhodes, M. G. 2005. An own-age bias in face recognition for children and older adults. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 12: 1043–1047. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). This is the own-age bias. Research has shown that this bias is at least partially based on experience since trainee teachers show less of an own-age bias than do other adults (Harrison & Hole, 2009 Harrison, V. and Hole, G. J. 2009. Evidence for a contact-based explanation of the own-age bias in face recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16: 264–269. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The present research tested the own-age bias in three groups of children (age 4–6, 7–9, 10–12 years) and a group of adults in the recognition of three age groups of faces (age 7–9, 20–22, and 65–90 years). Results showed an own-age bias for 7- to 9-year-old children and adults. Specifically, children could recognize faces more accurately if they were less than two years different from their own age than if they were more than two years older or younger. These results are discussed in terms of short-term experience with faces creating biases, and this rapidly changes with age.     

Processing of facial and non‐facial visual stimuli in 2–5‐year‐old children

The present experiments examined the degree to which analytic and holistic modes of processing play a role in the way 2–5‐year‐old children process facial and non‐facial visual stimuli. Children between 2 and 5 years of age were instructed to categorize faces (in Experiment 1) and non‐facial visual stimuli, such as birds and planes (in Experiment 2), into two categories. The categories were so constructed as to allow the children to categorize the facial and non‐facial stimuli either analytically (by focusing on a single attribute) or holistically (in terms of overall similarity). The results demonstrated that the previous conclusions concerning older children's (from 6 years onwards) holistic mode of facial processing could not be generalized to younger children because most of the 2–5‐year olds processed the faces by taking single facial attributes into account. A similar pattern of results emerged for the processing of objects, showing that the majority of the children focused on single attributes. Thus, for both visual domains, holistic processing was the exception rather than the rule. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Categorizing facial identities, emotions, and genders: attention to high- and low-spatial frequencies by children and adults

Three age groups of participants (5-6 years, 7-8 years, adults) matched faces on the basis of facial identity. The procedure involved either low- or high-pass filtered faces or hybrid faces composed from two faces associated with different spatial bandwidths. The comparison stimuli were unfiltered faces. In the three age groups, the data indicated a significant bias for processing of low-pass information in priority. In a second task, participants were asked to identify the emotion (smiling or grimacing) or gender (male or female) of hybrid high-pass/low-pass faces. Opposite results emerged in the two tasks irrespective of the age group; the gender discrimination task indicated a bias for low-pass information, and the emotion task indicated a bias for high-pass information. These differences suggest independent processing routes for functionally different types of information such as emotion, gender, and identity. These routes are already established by 5 years of age.     

Neurocognitive development in 5- to 16-year-old North American children: A cross-sectional study

Executive functions are thought to be the latest functions to mature. However, this view has not been tested by assessing simultaneously memory, perception of emotions, visuospatial perception, and visuoconstructional skills. NEPSY II norm data from 1000 5- to 16-year-old U.S. children were obtained. Fifteen NEPSY II subtests with no floor or ceiling effects in any age group and no major changes in task type were selected. The 16-year level was attained at age 12 to 13 in all subtests with two exceptions: social perception (age 10 to 11) and narrative memory (age 14). Trend analyses showed that development was rapid in the age range 5 to 9 years followed by a deceleration in the rate of development. Peak performances were reached at 14 to 16 years but later in some subtests representing executive functions, verbal memory, and visuospatial performance. Thus, the study specified developmental time tables of neurocognitive functions. It demonstrated that not only executive functions but also verbal memory and visuospatial performance continue to develop beyond age 16.     

Electrophysiological correlates of the composite face illusion: Disentangling perceptual and decisional components of holistic face processing in the human brain

When the bottom halves of two faces differ, people’s behavioral judgment of the identical top halves of those faces is impaired: they report that the top halves are different, and/or take more time than usual to provide a response. This behavioral measure is known as the composite face effect (CFE) and has traditionally been taken as evidence that faces are perceived holistically. Recently, however, it has been claimed that this effect is driven almost entirely by decisional, rather than perceptual, factors ( Richler, Gauthier, Wenger, & Palmeri, 2008). To disentangle the contribution of perceptual and decisional brain processes, we aimed to obtain an event-related potential (ERP) measure of the CFE at a stage of face encoding ( Jacques & Rossion, 2009) in the absence of a behavioral CFE effect. Sixteen participants performed a go/no-go task in an oddball paradigm, lifting a finger of their right or left hand when the top half of a face changed identity. This change of identity of the top of the face was associated with an increased ERP signal on occipito-temporal electrode sites at the N170 face-sensitive component (∼160 ms), the later decisional P3b component, and the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) starting at ∼350 ms. The N170 effect was observed equally early when only the unattended bottom part of the face changed, indicating that an identity change was perceived across the whole face in this condition. Importantly, there was no behavioral response bias for the bottom change trials, and no evidence of decisional biases from electrophysiological data (no P3b and LRP deflection in no-go trials). These data show that an early CFE can be measured in ERPs in the absence of any decisional response bias, indicating that the CFE reflects primarily the visual perception of the whole face.     

Gender attribution and gender agreement in 4- to 10-year-old French children

Grammatical gender is generally considered an early and error-free acquisition in French children. This article first examines how children cope with the gender attribution problem, i.e., how they determine the gender of individual nouns. We consider the plausibility and requirements of an account in which tacit phonological assignment rules are put to use to solve attribution problems and contrast it with a simple “masculine as default” strategy. Elicited production data from three experiments, involving 312 4–10-year-old French children and 40 adult controls, were found compatible with this latter scenario and to provide only scant support for the former one. Second, we argue that previous studies have overestimated French children's gender agreement abilities, and that French children's ability to make the article and the adjective agree can be assumed from age 7 onwards, but not before.     

9~10岁儿童和成人的一致性序列效应

一致性序列效应是指个体根据前一情境中的冲突信息, 灵活适应当前环境的能力。研究选取9~10岁的儿童和18~25岁的成人为被试, 采用色-词Stroop任务和Stroop与Flanker刺激混合的任务, 在控制重复启动的影响后, 考察一致性序列效应在不同任务中的年龄差异。结果发现, 在不同的任务中, 儿童和成人均表现出显著的一致性序列效应, 且一致性序列效应的大小不存在显著差异。研究结果表明, 冲突适应过程涉及更高级的加工过程, 9~10岁的儿童已具备类似成人的、更一般化的冲突适应能力。     

Visual control of manual aiming movements in 6- to 10-year-old children and adults

Recent results indicate that adults modulate their initial movement impulse toward a stationary visual target by processing visual afferent information. The authors investigated whether the mechanisms responsible for those modulations are already in place in young children or develop as the children grow older. Adults (n = 10) and 6-, 8- and 10-year-old children (ns = 6, 7, and 7, respectively) performed a video-aiming task while vision of the cursor they were moving was (acquisition) or was not (transfer) visible. The results indicated that within-participant variability of the initial impulse trajectory of the children's aiming movement leveled-off in acquisition between peak extent deceleration and the end of the initial impulse, whereas it increased linearly as movement unfolded in transfer. The results also indicated that children modulate their initial movement impulse when visual afferent information is available, although to a lesser extent than adults do, and strongly imply that contrary to past suggestions, the initial impulse of an aiming movement is not ballistic.     

Causal perception of action-and-reaction sequences in 8- to 10-month-olds

Four experiments with 202 8- to 10-month-old infants studied their sensitivity to causation-at-a-distance in schematic events seen as goal-directed action and reaction by adults and whether this depends on attributes associated with animate agents. In Experiment 1, a red square moved toward a blue square without making contact; in “reaction” events blue moved away while red was approaching, whereas in “delay” events blue started after red stopped. Infants were habituated to one event and then tested on its reversal. Spatiotemporal features reversed for both events, but causal roles changed only in reversed reactions. Infants dishabituated more to reversed reaction events than to reversed delay events. Squares moved rigidly or in a nonrigid animal-like fashion. Infants discriminated these, but motion pattern did not affect responses to reversal. Infants also discriminated reactions from launching and dishabituated to reversed reactions lacking self-initiated motion. These results suggest that sensitivity to causation-at-a-distance depends on the event structure but not pattern or onset typical of animal motion.     

Attention to low- and high-spatial frequencies in categorizing facial identities, emotions and gender in children with autism

This study was aimed at investigating face categorization strategies in children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). Performance of 17 children with ASD was compared to that of 17 control children in a face-matching task, including hybrid faces (composed of two overlapping faces of different spatial bandwidths) and either low- or high-pass filtered faces. Participants were asked to match faces on the basis of identity, emotion or gender. Results revealed that children with ASD used the same strategies as controls when matching faces by gender. By contrast, in the identity and the emotion conditions, children with ASD showed a high-pass bias (i.e., preference for local information), contrary to controls. Consistent with previous studies on autism, these findings suggest that children with ASD do use atypical (local-oriented) strategies to process faces.     

Understanding coexistence of internal states in children and adults

We investigated the conceptualization of suffering and well-being states pertaining to physical and psychological domains by examining children's and adults’ acceptance of coexistence of two co-occurring internal states. Children and adults decided whether pairs of states may coexist, justified their answers, and reported whether they had personal experience of that. The pairs of states could involve same valence and different domain, different valence and different domain, and different valence and same domain. The results showed that acceptance, plausibility, complexity, and causality of justifications vary depending on age and/or type of state co-occurrence. The role of factors like cognitive processing, personal experience, and asymmetric organization of the constructs of valence and domain is discussed, in light of the applied relevance of the findings.     

The ontogeny of face identity; I. Eight- to 21-week-old infants use internal and external face features in identity

A paradigm was designed to study how infants identify live faces. Eight- to 21-week-old infants were seated comfortably and were presented an adult female, dressed in a white laboratory coat and a white turtle neck sweater, until habituation ensued. The adult then left the room. One minute later either she or an identically garbed confederate returned. Looking time did not increase above habituation levels when the original experimenter returned, but increased substantially when the confederate entered the room. Furthermore, internal features alone could serve as the basis of face identity. Looking times of infants who had habituated to experimenters with masked outer features of hair, ears and neck also markedly increased when a second identically dressed experimenter returned. Identity in this instance could only be based on internal facial characteristics. A second study assessed the contributions of internal and external facial features to identity. Infants were habituated to an experimenter in a short wig. One minute later they saw her again, either in the same short wig or in a long one. Alternatively, they saw a second experimenter wearing either the short wig or the long one. Infants looked longer only to the stranger wearing the long wig. Very brief looking times occurred to the familiar adult, regardless of wig, and to the stranger wearing the familiar wig. This paradigm provides an approach to discover rules used by infants of different ages to process and identify adult faces and to establish the bases of face preference.     

Why 8-year-olds cannot tell the difference between Steve Martin and Paul Newman: factors contributing to the slow development of sensitivity to the spacing of facial features

Children are nearly as sensitive as adults to some cues to facial identity (e.g., differences in the shape of internal features and the external contour), but children are much less sensitive to small differences in the spacing of facial features. To identify factors that contribute to this pattern, we compared 8-year-olds' sensitivity to spacing cues with that of adults under a variety of conditions. In the first two experiments, participants made same/different judgments about faces differing only in the spacing of facial features, with the variations being kept within natural limits. To measure the effect of attention, we reduced the salience of featural information by blurring faces and occluding features (Experiment 1). To measure the role of encoding speed and memory limitations, we presented pairs of faces simultaneously and for an unlimited time (Experiment 2). To determine whether participants' sensitivity would increase when spacing distortions were so extreme as to make the faces grotesque, we manipulated the spacing of features beyond normal limits and asked participants to rate each face on a "bizarreness" scale (Experiment 3). The results from the three experiments indicate that low salience, poor encoding efficiency, and limited memory can partially account for 8-year-olds' poor performance on face processing tasks that require sensitivity to the spacing of features, a kind of configural processing that underlies adults' expertise. However, even when the task is modified to compensate for these problems, children remain less sensitive than adults to the spacing of features.