Face processing and familiarity: Evidence from eye‐movement data

How is information extracted from familiar and unfamiliar faces? Three experiments, in which eye‐movement measures were used, examined whether there was differential sampling of the internal face region according to familiarity. Experiment 1 used a face familiarity task and found that whilst the majority of fixations fell within the internal region, there were no differences in the sampling of this region according to familiarity. Experiment 2 replicated these findings, using a standard recognition memory paradigm. The third experiment employed a matching task, and once again found that the majority of fixations fell within the internal region. Additionally, this experiment found that there was more sampling of the internal region when faces were familiar compared with when they were unfamiliar. The use of eye fixation measures affirms the importance of internal facial features in the recognition of familiar faces compared with unfamiliar faces, but only when viewers compare pairs of faces.     

Recognition advantage of happy faces in extrafoveal vision: Featural and affective processing

Happy, surprised, disgusted, angry, sad, fearful, and neutral facial expressions were presented extrafoveally (2.5° away from fixation) for 150 ms, followed by a probe word for recognition (Experiment 1) or a probe scene for affective valence evaluation (Experiment 2). Eye movements were recorded and gaze-contingent masking prevented foveal viewing of the faces. Results showed that (a) happy expressions were recognized faster than others in the absence of fixations on the faces, (b) the same pattern emerged when the faces were presented upright or upside-down, (c) happy prime faces facilitated the affective evaluation of emotionally congruent probe scenes, and (d) such priming effects occurred at 750 but not at 250 ms prime–probe stimulus–onset asynchrony. This reveals an advantage in the recognition of happy faces outside of overt visual attention, and suggests that this recognition advantage relies initially on featural processing and involves processing of positive affect at a later stage.     

不可信面孔在视知觉加工中的注意偏向：来自眼动的证据

使用眼动追踪技术探究个体对同时呈现的可信和不可信面孔的视知觉加工差异, 以及注意偏向与可信和不可信面孔的记忆关系。结果发现：(1)被试再认不可信面孔成绩要好于可信面孔; (2)首注视点更多地偏向于不可信面孔, 并且落在不可信面孔上的总注视时间/注视点个数更长/多; (3)回归分析表明首注视点偏向能预测不可信面孔的再认优势。结果表明人们对不可信面孔产生更多的注意警觉与维持, 并且对不可信面孔的警觉能预测不可信面孔的记忆优势。     

Aberrant first fixations when looking at inverted faces in various poses: The result of the centre‐of‐gravity effect?

Face recognition is essential in everyday human life, and all faces are encountered in different poses. However, when a face is inverted, difficulties arise for recognition and eye movements may (Barton, Radcliffe, Cherkasova, Edleman, & Intriligator, 2006) or may not be disrupted (Williams & Henderson, 2007). The present study explored the effects of orientation and pose on recognition and eye movements during a standard old/new recognition task in order to resolve whether inversion disrupts eye movements. Eye‐tracking data looked at the first fixations, the number of fixations, and the duration of fixations over a face. A standard inversion effect was observed, but the three‐quarter view advantage was not observed. Eye‐movement data revealed that the eyes were the most sampled feature (in terms of first fixation, number of fixations, and duration of fixation) for all upright faces, however, other features were sampled first for inverted faces. These results are consistent with Barton et al.'s (2006) but not Williams and Henderson's (2007) findings: possible explanations for this are discussed with the caveat that the same images were used from learning to test.     

The Mental Representations of Faces and Houses: Issues Concerning Parts and Wholes

We explore the integration of facial features and house parts to form holistic representations of complete objects. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3, we test for evidence of the holistic representation of houses and faces. We do so by testing for a complete over part probe advantage (CPA) in 2AFC recognition and matching tasks. We present evidence consistent with holistic features being represented for both types of stimuli. In Experiments 4 and 5, we examine further theeffect with faces. Experiment 4 shows thatfacial features used in the matching task contribute differentially to CPAs across varying probe delays but with a similar pattern to that found in the recognition task (Experiment 1). Experiment5 shows thatCPAs are mandatory and cannot be removed by precueing with the probe type or the name of the feature to be probed.     

卡通面孔分类与识别加工的ERP比较研究

通过ERP方法,考察卡通面孔分类（人和动物）的脑机制及其与卡通面孔识别（人与车）的差异。结果表明,分类任务中,动物面孔VPP潜伏期显著长于人,N170潜伏期主效应不显著、波幅半球效应显著,LPP波幅在顶叶和中央区最大;分类任务VPP和LPP波幅均显著大于识别。结论：卡通面孔分类比识别速度慢、强度大,消耗心理资源多。顶叶和中央区可能是执行分类任务的主要脑区,且加工人类面孔具有优势。面孔加工中结构编码和特征编码可能部分是并行的。     

Haven't we met before? The effect of facial familiarity on repetition priming

Within the word recognition literature, word‐frequency and hence familiarity has been shown to affect the degree of repetition priming. The current paper reports two experiments which examine whether familiarity also affects the degree of repetition priming for faces. The results of Experiment 1 confirmed that familiarity did moderate the degree of priming in a face recognition task. Low familiarity faces were primed to a significantly greater degree than high familiarity faces in terms of accuracy, speed, and efficiency of processing. Experiment 2 replicated these results but additionally, demonstrated that familiarity moderates priming for name recognition as well as face recognition. These results can be accommodated within both a structural account of repetition priming ( Burton, Bruce & Johnston, 1990 ) and an Episodic Memory account of repetition priming (see Roediger, 1990 ), and are discussed in terms of a common mechanism for priming, learning and the representation of familiarity.     

The revealing glance: Eye gaze behavior to concealed information

We explored the usefulness of eye fixation durations as a dependent measure in a concealed knowledge test, drawing on Ryan, Hannula, and Cohen (2007), who found eye fixations on a familiar face to be longer than fixations on an unknown face. However, in their study, participants always had to select the known face out of three faces; thus, recognition and response intention could not be differentiated. In the experimental phase of our experiment, participants saw six faces per trial and had to select one of them. We had three conditions: In the first, one of the six faces was a known face, and the participants had to conceal that knowledge and select another face (concealed display); in another, one of the six faces was a known face, and the participants had to select that face (revealed display); or finally, all six faces were unknown, and participants had to select any of the six faces (neutral display). Using fixation durations as the dependent measure, we found a pure and early recognition effect; that is, fixations on the concealed faces (known but not selected) were longer than fixations on the nonselected unknown target faces in the neutral display. In addition, we found a response intention effect; that is, fixation durations on the selected known faces were longer than those on concealed faces (known but not selected).     

Repetition priming and face processing: Priming occurs within the system that responds to the identity of a face

A familiar stimulus that has recently been recognized will be recognized a second time more quickly and more accurately than if it had not been primed by the earlier encounter. This is the phenomenon of “repetition priming”. Four experiments on repetition priming of face recognition suggest that repetition priming is a consequence of changes within the system that responds to the familiarity of a stimulus. In Experiment 1, classifying familiar faces by occupation facilitated subsequent responses to the same faces in a familiarity decision task (Is this face familiar or unfamiliar?) but not in an expression decision task (Is this face smiling or unsmiling?) or a sex decision task (Is this face male or female?). In Experiment 2, familiar faces showed repetition priming in a familiarity decision task, regardless of whether a familiarity judgment or an expression judgment had been required when the faces were first encountered. Expression decisions to familiar faces again failed to show repetition priming. In Experiment 3, familiar faces showed repetition priming in a familiarity decision task, regardless of whether a familiarity judgment or a sex judgment had been asked for when the faces were first encountered. Sex decisions to familiar faces again failed to show repetition priming. In Experiment 4, familiarity decisions continued to show repetition priming when a brief presentation time with encouragement to respond while the face was displayed reduced response latencies to speeds comparable to those for sex and expression judgments in Experiments 1 to 3. The results are problematic for theories that propose that repetition priming is mediated by episodic records of previous acts of stimulus encoding.     

Detection of emotional faces: low perceptual threshold and wide attentional span

In two experiments, prime face stimuli with an emotional or a neutral expression were presented individually for 25 to 125 ms, either in foveal or parafoveal vision; following a mask, a probe face or a word label appeared for recognition. Accurate detection and sensitivity (A') were higher for angry, happy, and sad faces than for nonemotional (neutral) or novel (scheming) faces at short exposure times (25-75 ms), in both the foveal and the parafoveal field, and with both the probe face and the probe word. These results indicate that there is a low perceptual threshold for unambiguous emotional faces, which are especially likely to be detected both within and outside the focus of attention; and that this facilitated detection involves processing of the affective meaning of faces, not only discrimination of formal visual features.     

Faces elicit different scanning patterns depending on task demands

Eye movements were recorded while participants discriminated upright and inverted faces that differed with respect to either configural or featural information. Two hypotheses were examined: (1) whether featural and configural information processing elicit different scanning patterns; (2) whether fixations on a specific region of the face dominate scanning patterns. Results from two experiments were compared to examine whether participants’ prior knowledge of the kind of information that would be relevant for the task (i.e., configural vs featural) influences eye movements. In Experiment 1, featural and configural discrimination trials were presented in random order such that participants were unaware of the information that would be relevant on any given trial. In Experiment 2, featural and configural discrimination trials were blocked and participants were informed of the nature of the discriminations. The results of both experiments suggest that faces elicit different scanning patterns depending on task demands. When participants were unaware of the nature of the information relevant for the task at hand, face processing was dominated by attention to the eyes. When participants were aware that relational information was relevant, scanning was dominated by fixations to the center of the face. We conclude that faces elicit scanning strategies that are driven by task demands.     

Judging Words at Face Value: Interference in a Word Processing Task Reveals Automatic Processing of Affective Facial Expressions

Earlier research has indicated that some characteristics of facial expressions may be automatically processed. This study investigated automaticity as evidenced by involuntary interference in a word evaluation task. Compound stimuli, consisting of words superimposed on pictures of affective faces, were presented to subjects who were given the task of evaluating the affective valence of the words while disregarding the faces. Results of three experiments showed that word evaluation was influenced by the concurrently shown affective faces. Overall, negative words were found to require longer latencies, indicating that more processing resources are invested in negative than in positive stimuli. This speed advantage for positive words was modified by the faces. Negative words were facilitated, relative to positive ones, when shown with a negative expression (e.g. a sad face). Correspondingly, negative words were inhibited, relative to positive ones, when shown with a positive expression (e.g. a happy face). The results are consistent with automatic, involuntary semantic processing of affective facial expressions.     

Age-related differences in brain electrical activity during extended continuous face recognition in younger children, older children and adults

To examine the development of recognition memory in primary-school children, 36 healthy younger children (8-9 years old) and 36 healthy older children (11-12 years old) participated in an ERP study with an extended continuous face recognition task (Study 1). Each face of a series of 30 faces was shown randomly six times interspersed with distracter faces. The children were required to make old vs. new decisions. Older children responded faster than younger children, but younger children exhibited a steeper decrease in latencies across the five repetitions. Older children exhibited better accuracy for new faces, but there were no age differences in recognition accuracy for repeated faces. For the N2, N400 and late positive complex (LPC), we analyzed the old/new effects (repetition 1 vs. new presentation) and the extended repetition effects (repetitions 1 through 5). Compared to older children, younger children exhibited larger frontocentral N2 and N400 old/new effects. For extended face repetitions, negativity of the N2 and N400 decreased in a linear fashion in both age groups. For the LPC, an ERP component thought to reflect recollection, no significant old/new or extended repetition effects were found. Employing the same face recognition paradigm in 20 adults (Study 2), we found a significant N400 old/new effect at lateral frontal sites and a significant LPC repetition effect at parietal sites, with LPC amplitudes increasing linearly with the number of repetitions. This study clearly demonstrates differential developmental courses for the N400 and LPC pertaining to recognition memory for faces. It is concluded that face recognition in children is mediated by early and probably more automatic than conscious recognition processes. In adults, the LPC extended repetition effect indicates that adult face recognition memory is related to a conscious and graded recollection process rather than to an automatic recognition process.     

The effects of distinctiveness,presentation time and delay on face recognition

Abstract

The distinctiveness of a face has been found to be an important factor in face recognition. We investigated the effect of the distinctiveness of a face upon subjects' speed and accuracy of recognition following different presentation times and retention intervals. It was found that (1) hits decreased with increasing delay; (2) false alarms increased and d primes decreased with a presentation time of 1 sec compared with 5 sec; (3) distinctive faces received more hits and higher d primes than non-distinctive faces; and (4) response latencies were shorter for distinctive targets than for distinctive distraction or non distinctive targets or distractors. These results were discussed in terms of the literature on the distinctiveness effect in face recognition.     

Human faces capture attention and attract first saccades without longer fixation

Human faces attract attention, evidenced by reaction time (RT) advantages over non-face stimuli in visual search tasks. In the current study, participants’ eye movements were tracked during a search task to test how the attentional capture of faces is related to looking behaviour. On each trial, participants were cued with a category name (automobiles, birds, chairs, dogs, faces, bodies, or plants). An array of images, one exemplar from each category, was then presented until participants indicated whether the target matched the cue. Results showed that faces as targets resulted in faster search times and were more likely to capture first fixations. Fixations on faces were also shorter compared to other categories. Faces captured attention, attracting first fixations, and participants appeared to be more fluent at processing faces, resulting in shorter fixations. Reaction time advantages for faces could be due to both attention capture and ultra-rapid processing.     

Perceptual salience of derivational suffixes in visual word recognition

This study analyzes the role of derivational suffixes in visual word recognition, tracking the eye movements of 31 participants in a sentence-reading task in Spanish. Perceptual salience of suffixes was operationalized as the proportion of letters represented by the suffixes with respect to the full words, that is, we relate the number of letters comprising the suffixes to the number of letters in the words in which they appear. The results reveal a significant role in first fixation duration of both word frequency – the more frequent the word, the shorter the fixations, and perceptual salience – the more salient the suffix, the longer the fixations. Moreover, in gaze duration, our results show a main effect of word length – the longer the word, the longer the fixations; word frequency; and significant interactions between word frequency and perceptual salience of suffixes on the one hand – the effect of word frequency is only significant when perceptual salience of suffixes is high, and between word frequency and word length on the other hand – the frequency effect decreases as word length increases. Overall results are interpreted in the light of the dual route models by which full-form and morphological processing interactively cooperate in visual word recognition.     

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.     

内隐记忆和外显记忆的脑机制分离：面孔再认的ERP研究

该研究采用“学习-再认”实验范式探讨面孔领域的内隐记忆与外显记忆之间的关系。学习阶段采用选择性注意任务,让被试加工面孔上的字来控制对面孔的加工水平,再认阶段采用新旧判断,分析再认出旧面孔与新面孔(外显记忆),以及未再认旧面孔与新面孔(内隐记忆)的ERPs差异。结果表明,在单一的再认过程中,外显记忆和内隐记忆的脑机制产生了分离,外显记忆从刺激后400ms开始,主要表现在前额区和额区,而内隐记忆主要表现在刺激后300~500ms的中央区和顶区。该结果与以往在词领域研究中得到的结果极为类似,表明两种记忆类型在各个刺激领域之间存在着共同性     

Do they ‘look’ different(ly)? Dynamic face recognition in Malaysians: Chinese,Malays and Indians compared

Previous cross-cultural eye-tracking studies examining face recognition discovered differences in the eye movement strategies that observers employ when perceiving faces. However, it is unclear (1) the degree to which this effect is fundamentally related to culture and (2) to what extent facial physiognomy can account for the differences in looking strategies when scanning own- and other-race faces. In the current study, Malay, Chinese and Indian young adults who live in the same multiracial country performed a modified yes/no recognition task. Participants' recognition accuracy and eye movements were recorded while viewing muted face videos of own- and other-race individuals. Behavioural results revealed a clear own-race advantage in recognition memory, and eye-tracking results showed that the three ethnic race groups adopted dissimilar fixation patterns when perceiving faces. Chinese participants preferentially attended more to the eyes than Indian participants did, while Indian participants made more and longer fixations on the nose than Malay participants did. In addition, we detected statistically significant, though subtle, differences in fixation patterns between the faces of the three races. These findings suggest that the racial differences in face-scanning patterns may be attributed both to culture and to variations in facial physiognomy between races.     

Attentional resource demands of visual word recognition in naming and lexical decisions.

Attentional demands of lexical access were assessed with dual-task methodology. Subjects performed an auditory probe task alone (single-task) or combined (dual-task) with either a lexical decision or a naming task. In Experiment 1, probe performance showed a decrement from single- to dual-task conditions during recognition of words in both lexical decision and naming tasks. In addition, decrements in probe performance were larger during processing of low-frequency compared with high-frequency words in both of the word recognition tasks. Experiment 2 showed that the time course of frequency-sensitive demands was similar across lexical decision and naming tasks and that attention is required early in the word recognition sequence. The results support the assumption that lexical access is both frequency sensitive and attention demanding.