scholarly journals Familiarity Facilitates Feature-based Face Processing

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Visconti di Oleggio Castello ◽  
Kelsey G. Wheeler ◽  
Carlo Cipolli ◽  
M. Ida Gobbini
Keyword(s):  
Face Detection ◽  
Face Processing ◽  
Search Task ◽  
Visual Search Task ◽  
Face Inversion ◽  
Face Images ◽  
Holistic Face Processing ◽  
Unfamiliar Face ◽  
Feature Based ◽  
Unfamiliar Faces

AbstractRecognition of personally familiar faces is remarkably efficient, effortless and robust. We asked if feature-based face processing facilitates detection of familiar faces by testing the effect of face inversion on a visual search task for familiar and unfamiliar faces. Because face inversion disrupts configural and holistic face processing, we hypothesized that inversion would diminish the familiarity advantage to the extent that it is mediated by such processing. Subjects detected personally familiar and stranger target faces in arrays of two, four, or six face images. Subjects showed significant facilitation of personally familiar face detection for both upright and inverted faces. The effect of familiarity on target absent trials, which involved only rejection of unfamiliar face distractors, suggests that familiarity facilitates rejection of unfamiliar distractors as well as detection of familiar targets. The preserved familiarity effect for inverted faces suggests that facilitation of face detection afforded by familiarity reflects mostly feature-based processes.

scholarly journals How robust is familiar face recognition? A repeat detection study of more than 1000 faces

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 170634
Author(s):  
Angus F. Chapman ◽  
Hannah Hawkins-Elder ◽  
Tirta Susilo
Keyword(s):  
Face Recognition ◽  
Detection Task ◽  
Familiar Face ◽  
Robust Representation ◽  
Face Images ◽  
Unfamiliar Face ◽  
Unfamiliar Faces ◽  
Repeat Detection ◽  
Better Than

Recent theories suggest that familiar faces have a robust representation in memory because they have been encountered over a wide variety of contexts and image changes (e.g. lighting, viewpoint and expression). By contrast, unfamiliar faces are encountered only once, and so they do not benefit from such richness of experience and are represented based on image-specific details. In this registered report, we used a repeat detection task to test whether familiar faces are recognized better than unfamiliar faces across image changes. Participants viewed a stream of more than 1000 celebrity face images for 0.5 s each, any of which might be repeated at a later point and has to be detected. Some participants saw the same image at repeats, while others saw a different image of the same face. A post-experimental familiarity check allowed us to determine which celebrities were and were not familiar to each participant. We had three predictions: (i) detection would be better for familiar than unfamiliar faces, (ii) detection would be better across same rather than different images, and (iii) detection of familiar faces would be comparable across same and different images, but detection of unfamiliar faces would be poorer across different images. We obtained support for the first two predictions but not the last. Instead, we found that repeat detection of faces, regardless of familiarity, was poorer across different images. Our study suggests that the robustness of familiar face recognition may have limits, and that under some conditions, familiar face recognition can be just as influenced by image changes as unfamiliar face recognition.

scholarly journals Individual Differences in Infants’ Temperament Affect Face Processing

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 474
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Rennels ◽  
Andrea J. Kayl ◽  
Kirsty M. Kulhanek
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Face Processing ◽  
Search Task ◽  
Visual Search Task ◽  
Effect Sizes ◽  
Positive Interactions ◽  
Timely Manner ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Gender

Infants show an advantage in processing female and familiar race faces, but the effect sizes are often small, suggesting individual differences in their discrimination abilities. This research assessed whether differences in 6–10-month-olds’ temperament (surgency and orienting) predicted how they scanned individual faces varying in race and gender during familiarization and whether and how long it took them to locate the face during a visual search task. This study also examined whether infants viewing faces posing pleasant relative to neutral expressions would facilitate their discrimination of male and unfamiliar race faces. Results showed that infants’ surgency on its own or in conjunction with their orienting regularly interacted with facial characteristics to predict their scanning and location of faces. Furthermore, infants’ scanning patterns (dwell times and internal–external fixation shifts) correlated with their ability and time to locate a familiarized face. Moreover, infants who viewed faces with pleasant expressions showed better discrimination of unfamiliar race and male faces compared with infants who viewed neutral faces. Including temperament in the analyses consistently demonstrated its significance for understanding infant face processing. Findings suggest that positive interactions with other-race individuals and men might reduce processing disadvantages for those face types. Locating familiar adults in a timely manner is a crucial skill for infants to develop and these data elucidate factors influencing this ability.

scholarly journals Spatial and feature-based suppression in working memory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liam Matthews ◽  
Tobias Feldmann-Wüstefeld
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Search ◽  
Search Task ◽  
Visual Search Task ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Positive Weight ◽  
Feature Based ◽  
With Memory

Working memory (WM) can guide attention towards items similar to its content, both based on features and locations maintained in WM. So far, however, this has only been demonstrated with memory items that are relevant and thus maintained with a positive weight. The finding that negative attention templates can support the suppression of upcoming distractors raises the question whether items can also be stored with a negative priority in WM. We let participants memorize the exact hue of a memory target that was presented among not-to-be-encoded memory distractors. Before their WM was probed, they performed a visual search task in which they had to find a target among distractors. When the search target was presented in the same color as an item suppressed from WM, response times (RTs) were longer than for a target presented in the same color as the memory target. Similarly, when the search target was presented at the same location as an items suppressed from WM, RTs were longer than for a target presented at the same location as the memory target. Our results suggest that items can be maintained in WM with a negative priority and then support the suppression of subsequent similar stimuli. Such items with negative priority in WM may be what constitutes negative attentional templates.

Exploring Levels of Face Familiarity by Using an Indirect Face-Matching Measure

Perception ◽  
10.1068/p3335 ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 31 (8) ◽  
pp. 985-994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Clutterbuck ◽  
Robert A Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Face Processing ◽  
Matching Task ◽  
Indirect Measure ◽  
Face Matching ◽  
External Feature ◽  
Unfamiliar Face ◽  
Matching Performance ◽  
Unfamiliar Faces

An experiment is reported in which participants matched complete images of unfamiliar, moderately familiar, and highly familiar faces with simultaneously presented images of internal and external features. Participants had to decide if the two images depicted same or different individuals. Matches to internal features were made faster to highly familiar faces than both to moderately familiar and to unfamiliar faces, and matches to moderately familiar faces were made faster than to unfamiliar faces. For external feature matches, this advantage was only found for “different” decision matches to highly familiar faces compared to unfamiliar faces. The results indicate that the differences in familiar and unfamiliar face processing are not the result of all-or-none effects, but seem to have a graded impact on matching performance. These findings extend the earlier work of Young et al (1985 Perception14 737–746), and we discuss the possibility of using the matching task as an indirect measure of face familiarity.

scholarly journals Individual recognition is associated with holistic face processing in Polistes paper wasps in a species-specific way

2021 ◽  
Vol 288 (1943) ◽  
pp. 20203010
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Tibbetts ◽  
Juanita Pardo-Sanchez ◽  
Julliana Ramirez-Matias ◽  
Aurore Avarguès-Weber
Keyword(s):  
Face Recognition ◽  
Face Processing ◽  
Individual Recognition ◽  
Holistic Processing ◽  
Paper Wasp ◽  
Paper Wasps ◽  
Wasp Species ◽  
Face Images ◽  
Holistic Face Processing ◽  
Species Specific

Most recognition is based on identifying features, but specialization for face recognition in primates relies on a different mechanism, termed ‘holistic processing’ where facial features are bound together into a gestalt which is more than the sum of its parts. Here, we test whether individual face recognition in paper wasps also involved holistic processing using a modification of the classic part-whole test in two related paper wasp species: Polistes fuscatus , which use facial patterns to individually identify conspecifics, and Polistes dominula , which lacks individual recognition. We show that P. fuscatus use holistic processing to discriminate between P. fuscatus face images but not P. dominula face images. By contrast, P. dominula do not rely on holistic processing to discriminate between conspecific or heterospecific face images. Therefore, P. fuscatus wasps have evolved holistic face processing, but this ability is highly specific and shaped by species-specific and stimulus-specific selective pressures. Convergence towards holistic face processing in distant taxa (primates, wasps) as well as divergence among closely related taxa with different recognition behaviour ( P. dominula , P. fuscatus ) suggests that holistic processing may be a universal adaptive strategy to facilitate expertise in face recognition.

scholarly journals Sheep recognize familiar and unfamiliar human faces from two-dimensional images

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (11) ◽  
pp. 171228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Knolle ◽  
Rita P. Goncalves ◽  
A. Jennifer Morton
Keyword(s):  
Face Recognition ◽  
Social Skills ◽  
Face Processing ◽  
Ovis Aries ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Holistic Face Processing ◽  
Social Animals ◽  
Processing Abilities ◽  
Human Faces ◽  
Unfamiliar Faces

One of the most important human social skills is the ability to recognize faces. Humans recognize familiar faces easily, and can learn to identify unfamiliar faces from repeatedly presented images. Sheep are social animals that can recognize other sheep as well as familiar humans. Little is known, however, about their holistic face-processing abilities. In this study, we trained eight sheep ( Ovis aries ) to recognize the faces of four celebrities from photographic portraits displayed on computer screens. After training, the sheep chose the ‘learned-familiar’ faces rather than the unfamiliar faces significantly above chance. We then tested whether the sheep could recognize the four celebrity faces if they were presented in different perspectives. This ability has previously been shown only in humans. Sheep successfully recognized the four celebrity faces from tilted images. Interestingly, there was a drop in performance with the tilted images (from 79.22 ± 7.5% to 66.5 ± 4.1%) of a magnitude similar to that seen when humans perform this task. Finally, we asked whether sheep could recognize a very familiar handler from photographs. Sheep identified the handler in 71.8 ± 2.3% of the trials without pretraining. Together these data show that sheep have advanced face-recognition abilities, comparable with those of humans and non-human primates.

Face Inversion Effect Emerges Under Critical Configural Discrepancy

2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jisien Yang ◽  
Adrian Schwaninger
Keyword(s):  
Face Recognition ◽  
Face Processing ◽  
Underlying Mechanism ◽  
Inversion Effect ◽  
Configural Processing ◽  
Major Contributor ◽  
Face Inversion Effect ◽  
Configural Information ◽  
Face Inversion ◽  
The Face

Configural processing has been considered the major contributor to the face inversion effect (FIE) in face recognition. However, most researchers have only obtained the FIE with one specific ratio of configural alteration. It remains unclear whether the ratio of configural alteration itself can mediate the occurrence of the FIE. We aimed to clarify this issue by manipulating the configural information parametrically using six different ratios, ranging from 4% to 24%. Participants were asked to judge whether a pair of faces were entirely identical or different. The paired faces that were to be compared were presented either simultaneously (Experiment 1) or sequentially (Experiment 2). Both experiments revealed that the FIE was observed only when the ratio of configural alteration was in the intermediate range. These results indicate that even though the FIE has been frequently adopted as an index to examine the underlying mechanism of face processing, the emergence of the FIE is not robust with any configural alteration but dependent on the ratio of configural alteration.

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