Feature processing and superiority of three-quarter views in face recognition

The specificity of face recognition is usually related to the hypothesis that it could be based mainly on global processing of the whole face. However, this does not mean that more analytic processes, like the local processing of some features, could not play a role in the recognition process in some circumstances. An experiment was conducted with 18 normal subjects in order to evaluate the role of analytic processes in the recognition of faces viewed from different angles. Makeup was applied to eyes and lips to enhance local processing (local cue). We found a positive effect of the makeup cue, which could be due to better recognition when the shape of eyes and lips are highlighted. Also, we found better recognition with left-sided views compared to right-sided views. Finally, the makeup effect was significant in left three-quarter views but not in right three-quarter views. If this effect is due to analytic processing of some facial features, it could be related to a left hemisphere operation.     

Temporal integration of face view sequences and recognition of novel views

When faces are learned from rotating view sequences, novel views may be recognized by matching them with an integrated representation of the sequence or with individual views. An integrated-representation process should benefit from short view durations, and thus from the inclusion of views in a short temporal window, allowing the distribution of attention over the entire sequence. A view-matching process should benefit from long view durations, allowing the attention to focus on each view. In a sequential comparison task, we tested the recognition of learned and novel interpolated and extrapolated views after learning faces from rapid and slow sequences (240 ms or 960 ms for each view). We found a superiority of rapid over slow sequences, in favour of the integrated-representation hypothesis. In addition, the recognition pattern for the different viewpoints in the sequence depended on the absence or presence of extrapolated views, showing a bias of the distribution of attention.     

熟悉面孔与陌生面孔识别的差异

摘 要：面孔识别包括熟悉面孔识别和陌生面孔识别,两者之间的差异已经得到了多方面的证明。神经生理学的研究发现,识别陌生面孔和熟悉面孔所激活的脑区存在差异,与识别陌生面孔相比,识别熟悉面孔的脑区活动范围更大,包括双侧前额叶、单侧颞叶、海马回、杏仁核、后扣带回和右下额叶。并且也存在脑电的差异,比如 N400和P600的差异。对陌生面孔和熟悉面孔识别具有相同影响的因素有：遮挡、倒置等;具有不同影响的因素有：视角、表情、内外部特征等。文章也探讨了陌生面孔变成熟悉面孔的过程,以及在这一过程中起主要作用的编码形式等。     

Collaboration can improve individual recognition memory: Evidence from immediate and delayed tests

In two experiments, we tested the effects of collaboration on individual recognition memory. In Experiment 1, participants studied pictures and words either for meaning or for surface properties and made recognition memory judgments individually either following group discussion among 3 members (collaborative condition) or in the absence of discussion (noncollaborative condition). Levels of processing and picture superiority effects were replicated, and collaboration significantly increased individual recognition memory. Experiment 2 replicated this positive effect and showed that even though memory sensitivity declined at longer delays (48 h and 1 week), collaboration continued to exert a positive influence. These findings show that (1) consensus is not necessary for producing benefits of collaboration on individual recognition, (2) collaborative facilitation on individual memory is robust, and (3) collaboration enhances individual memory further if conditions predispose individual accuracy in the absence of collaboration. Psychonomic Society, Inc. nt]pra|Parts of the research reported in this article were presented at the 77th Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Baltimore.     

Caricature and face recognition

Although caricatures are often gross distortions of faces, they frequently appear to be super-portraits capable of eliciting recognition better than veridical depictions. This may occur because faces are encoded as distinctive feature deviations from a prototype. The exaggeration of these deviations in a caricature may enhance recognition because it emphasizes the features of the face that are encoded. In two experiments, we tested the superportrait hypothesis and the encoding-by-caricature hypothesis. In the first experiment, caricatures were recognized better than faces, and true caricatures of previously seen faces were recognized better than the faces from which the caricatures had been developed. In the second experiment, faces and their caricatures were tachistoscopically presented in a sequential same/different reaction time task. Subjects were slower to distinguish the stimuli when the face preceded its caricature, indicating that caricatures are more similar to the encoded representation of a face than are stimuli in which the distinctive features are deemphasized.     

Carryover of scanning behaviour affects upright face recognition differently to inverted face recognition

Face perception is characterized by a distinct scanpath. While eye movements are considered functional, there has not been direct evidence that disrupting this scanpath affects face recognition performance. The present experiment investigated the influence of an irrelevant letter-search task (with letter strings arranged horizontally, vertically, or randomly) on the subsequent scanning strategies in processing upright and inverted famous faces. Participants’ response time to identify the face and the direction of their eye movements were recorded. The orientation of the letter search influenced saccadic direction when viewing the face images, such that a direct carryover-effect was observed. Following a vertically oriented letter-search task, the recognition of famous faces was slower and less accurate for upright faces, and faster for inverted faces. These results extend the carryover findings of Thompson and Crundall into a novel domain. Crucially they also indicate that upright and inverted faces are better processed by different eye movements, highlighting the importance of scanpaths in face recognition.     

Similarity effects in face recognition

Three experiments are described which examine the effects of similarity on face recognition using a new application of hierarchical clustering analysis (HCS). Experiments I and II employed a within-groups design where subjects attempted to recognize targets among decoys from the same and different cluster to the target. Common cluster membership accounted for 72% and 84%, respectively, of all false alarms in the two experiments. Absolute error rates were affected by the number of targets actually present in the array and the style of the instructions given to subjects but were not influenced by whether successive or simultaneous test presentation was employed. Experiment III used a between-subject design where targets were embedded in arrays composed from same or different clusters. False alarm rates were significantly higher for the same cluster condition, but hit rates were unaffected by recognition context. The significance of these findings for theories of face identification is discussed.     

Repetition priming of face recognition

Three experiments investigating the priming of the recognition of familiar faces are reported. In Experiment 1, recognizing the face of a celebrity in an “Is this face familiar?” task was primed by exposure several minutes earlier to a different photograph of the same person, but not by exposure to the person's written name (a partial replication of Bruce and Valentine, 1985). In Experiment 2, recognizing the face of a personal acquaintance was again primed by recognizing a different photograph of their face, but not by recognizing the acquaintance from that person's body shape, clothes etc. Experiment 3 showed that maximum repetition priming is obtained from prior exposure to an identical photograph of a famous face, less from a similar photograph, and least (but still significant) from a dissimilar photograph.

We argue that repetition priming is a function of the degree of physical similarity between two stimuli and that lack of priming between different stimulus types (e.g., written names and faces, or bodies and faces) may be attributable to lack of physical similarity between prime and test stimuli. Repetition priming effects may be best explained by some form of “instance-based” model such as that proposed by McClelland and Rumelhart (1985).     

Holistic processing predicts face recognition

The concept of holistic processing is a cornerstone of face-recognition research. In the study reported here, we demonstrated that holistic processing predicts face-recognition abilities on the Cambridge Face Memory Test and on a perceptual face-identification task. Our findings validate a large body of work that relies on the assumption that holistic processing is related to face recognition. These findings also reconcile the study of face recognition with the perceptual-expertise work it inspired; such work links holistic processing of objects with people's ability to individuate them. Our results differ from those of a recent study showing no link between holistic processing and face recognition. This discrepancy can be attributed to the use in prior research of a popular but flawed measure of holistic processing. Our findings salvage the central role of holistic processing in face recognition and cast doubt on a subset of the face-perception literature that relies on a problematic measure of holistic processing.     

Unawareness of impaired face recognition

We report investigations of the face processing abilities of SP, a right-handed woman who had suffered a subarachnoid haemorrhage from a right middle cerebral artery aneurysm. Although she could correctly assign visual stimuli to the 'face' category without difficulty, SP performed poorly on all other face processing, tasks, including 'closure' (Mooney faces), perception of facial expression, unfamiliar face matching, and identification of familiar faces. Identification of familiar people from nonfacial cues (names) remained relatively well-preserved, but severe impairments were evident on all face recognition tasks. Her errors mostly involved either failures to find a face familiar at all, or misidentification as another familiar person. In face-name learning tasks, there was evidence of 'covert' recognition of faces she failed to recognize overtly. SP's face processing impairment remained stable across a 20-month period of investigation, yet throughout this period she did not think that she had any problems in face recognition, and continued to show lack of insight into this impairment even when directly confronted with its consequences on formal testing. In contrast, SP showed adequate insight into other physical and cognitive impairments produced by her illness, including poor memory, hemiplegia, and hemianopia. We propose that her lack of insight into her face recognition problems involves a deficit-specific anosognosia, resulting from impairment of domain-specific monitoring abilities.     

面孔识别的自我群体偏向

面孔认知研究表明, 人们识别和再认自己所属群体(如种族、性别、年龄)面孔的成绩显著好于识别其他群体面孔的成绩。近年来围绕面孔识别的这种自我群体偏向进行了实验研究, 研究者提出了知觉经验说和社会认知论两种理论来解释其认知加工机制, 而类别化-个性化模型和双路径模型则是将两种理论分别加以整合提出的新解释。研究者还对面孔识别自我群体偏向的神经机制进行了研究, 探讨了评价者、评价对象和评价任务等因素对自我群体偏向的影响。提升面孔识别自我群体偏向研究的生态效度, 构建整合性理论模型以及加强跨文化和本土研究是未来研究的重要方向。     

Metacognition of emotional face recognition

While humans are adept at recognizing emotional states conveyed by facial expressions, the current literature suggests that they lack accurate metacognitions about their performance in this domain. This finding comes from global trait-based questionnaires that assess the extent to which an individual perceives him or herself as empathic, as compared to other people. Those who rate themselves as empathically accurate are no better than others at recognizing emotions. Metacognition of emotion recognition can also be assessed using relative measures that evaluate how well a person thinks s/he has understood the emotion in a particular facial display as compared to other displays. While this is the most common method of metacognitive assessment of people's judgments of learning or their feelings of knowing, this kind of metacognition--"relative meta-accuracy"--has not been studied within the domain of emotion. As well as asking for global metacognitive judgments, we asked people to provide relative, trial-by-trial prospective and retrospective judgments concerning whether they would be right or wrong in recognizing the expressions conveyed in particular facial displays. Our question was: Do people know when they will be correct in knowing what expression is conveyed, and do they know when they do not know? Although we, like others, found that global meta-accuracy was unpredictive of performance, relative meta-accuracy, given by the correlation between participants' trial-by-trial metacognitive judgments and performance on each item, were highly accurate both on the Mind in the Eyes task (Experiment 1) and on the Ekman Emotional Expression Multimorph task (in Experiment 2).     

Perceptual asymmetries in face recognition

Four experiments were carried out to investigate perceptual asymmetries in face recognition. Perceptual asymmetries favoring the half-face on the observer's left were found under free viewing conditions for both unfamiliar faces (Experiment 1) and famous faces (Experiment 3). For unfamiliar faces, this asymmetry was not obtained when fixation was controlled by presenting faces tachistoscopically (Experiment 2). For famous faces, the perceptual asymmetry favoring the half-face normally seen on the left did not appear to be retained in memory (Experiments 3 and 4). Asymmetries in face perception have been explained in terms of a direct access model of laterally effects. However, these results raise the possibility that asymmetric scanning or attentional factors may be important.     

Semantic contexts and face recognition

The present study investigated the effects of the new context reinstatement procedure on recognition memory for faces. All faces were portrayed in distinctive background contexts which were pretested to induce a negative emotion, a positive emotion or no emotion at all. These contexts were, at test, either the same (e.g. the same concentration camp), changed (e.g. concentration camp→road accident) or changed but of the same type (e.g. ‘semantic context’: two different concentration camps). Results provided evidence of considerable improvement of recognition performance with semantic context. Moreover, a context inducing a negative emotion was shown to impair face recognition, but semantic context was found to counteract such an impairment. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of their relevance for theories of recognition memory and practical contributions to eyewitness identification. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Famous face recognition,face matching,and extraversion

It has been previously established that extraverts who are skilled at interpersonal interaction perform significantly better than introverts on a face-specific recognition memory task. In our experiment we further investigate the relationship between extraversion and face recognition, focusing on famous face recognition and face matching. Results indicate that more extraverted individuals perform significantly better on an upright famous face recognition task and show significantly larger face inversion effects. However, our results did not find an effect of extraversion on face matching or inverted famous face recognition.     

Learning scenes from multiple views: Novel views can be recognized more efficiently than learned views

In two experiments, participants were trained to recognize a playground scene from four vantage points and were subsequently asked to recognize the playground from a novel perspective between the four learned viewing perspectives, as well as from the trained perspectives. In both experiments, people recognized the novel view more efficiently than those that they had recently used in order to learn the scene. Additionally, in Experiment 2, participants who viewed a novel stimulus on their very first test trial correctly recognized it more quickly (and also tended to recognize it more accurately) than did participants whose first test trial was a familiar view of the scene. These findings call into question the idea that scenes are recognized by comparing them with single previous experiences, and support a growing body of literature on the existence of psychological mechanisms that combine spatial information from multiple views of a scene.     

Perceptual learning in face processing: Comparison facilitates face recognition

Theoretical analyses of perceptual learning suggest that comparison between similar stimuli aids subsequent discrimination between them. The current studies examined whether the opportunity to compare a target face to other similar faces during a preexposure phase facilitated performance on a matching task. Performance was better when the target face had been presented in alternation with similar comparator faces than if that target had not been exposed before test. Exposure to the target face without comparators, or exposure alternating with dissimilar faces, improved performance relative to the nonexposed control but performance was not as good as when target exposure was given in alternation to similar comparison faces. The effects were not influenced by image changes between exposure and test. It is suggested that exposure to a face in comparison to similar stimuli focuses the central representation of a face on its unique features. In practical terms these results suggest that reliable identification of an individual from their photograph would be improved by viewing that photograph in comparison with photographs of similar people.     

Impaired face recognition does not preclude intact whole face perception

We studied intact and impaired processes in a prosopagnosic patient (RP). In Experiment 1, RP showed an inversion superiority effect with both faces and objects, with better performance when stimuli were presented upside down than in normal upright orientation. In Experiment 2, we studied the effect of face configuration directly by comparing matching performance with normal vs. scrambled faces. RP was worse with normal than with scrambled faces, whereas normal controls showed an advantage of a good face context. In Experiment 3, RP showed interference from external face features on the evaluation of internal face features. These results indicate, first, that although RP is impaired in face recognition and face matching, he does still encode the whole face rather than relying completely on parts-based procedures. Second, RP has a deficit at the level of the configural processes involved in finding subtle differences between individual faces, as his performance is worse when presented with a normal face configuration than with scrambled or inverted faces.