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.     

What happens to our representation of identity as familiar faces age? Evidence from priming and identity aftereffects

Matching identity in images of unfamiliar faces is error prone, but we can easily recognize highly variable images of familiar faces – even images taken decades apart. Recent theoretical development based on computational modelling can account for how we recognize extremely variable instances of the same identity. We provide complementary behavioural data by examining older adults’ representation of older celebrities who were also famous when young. In Experiment 1, participants completed a long-lag repetition priming task in which primes and test stimuli were the same age or different ages. In Experiment 2, participants completed an identity after effects task in which the adapting stimulus was an older or young photograph of one celebrity and the test stimulus was a morph between the adapting identity and a different celebrity; the adapting stimulus was the same age as the test stimulus on some trials (e.g., both old) or a different age (e.g., adapter young, test stimulus old). The magnitude of priming and identity after effects were not influenced by whether the prime and adapting stimulus were the same age or different age as the test face. Collectively, our findings suggest that humans have one common mental representation for a familiar face (e.g., Paul McCartney) that incorporates visual changes across decades, rather than multiple age-specific representations. These findings make novel predictions for state-of-the-art algorithms (e.g., Deep Convolutional Neural Networks).     

视知觉无意识加工中的形状优势效应

研究了视知觉无意识加工中是否存在形状优势效应。被试为天津师范大学本科生60名。仪器为pentium lll高分辨率计算机．程序用E-prime心理实验软件系统编制而成。在实验1中,用信号检测论技术发现．当启动图形呈现时间为20ms时．被试是不能觉知到该图形的。在实验2和3中．被试的任务分别是判断图形的形状和颜色,用MANOVA分析启动图形对靶图形的启动效应时发现．启动图形的颜色线索不会影响靶图形的形状判断,但启动图形的形状线索却能抑制或促进靶图形的颜色判断。实验证据提示．在判断物体整体特征时,无意识知觉具有形状优势效应。