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Facial perception - Y2 - Coggle Diagram
Facial perception - Y2
Faces (Gilhooly et al, 2022)
- Property 1 - as humans, we are tuned to recognise familiar faces even under adverse conditions
- Property 2 - instead, recognition of unfamiliar faces can be surprisingly poor, except for super recognisers
- Property 3 - holistic processing (Eysenck et al, 2010) -
3) Face recognition differs from recognition of other objects in that it involves more holistic processing (or configural processing)
- This means, it requires integration across the whole object as information about the specific features of a face can be unreliable (e.g. when individuals share similar features such as eye colour, shape) and because features can change
- Part-whole effect - the finding that it is easier to recognise a face part when it is presented within a whole face rather than in isolation
- Inversion effect - faces are harder to recognise when they are presented inverted or upside-down rather than upright (this effect is smaller with non-face objects and disappear with practice)
- Composite effect - participants are presented with two halves of different individuals and these are aligned or unaligned; perception of only one-half face is impaired when faces are aligned (compared to when they are unaligned)
-> These effects provide evidence that faces are subject to holistic / configural processing - they are not present in the processing of non-face objects
--> However, the inversion effect does not provide a direct assessment of holistic processing
--> Some people have much more experience processing faces and thus have developed an expertise
--> Evidence suggests that we memorise own-race faces in a more elaborate way that we do other race faces (Herzmann et a, 2022)
Familiar and unfamiliar faces (Friewald et al, 2016)
- Most research relies on using unfamiliar faces as they are ideal to isolate the contribution of the visual system to face recognition
- Instead, familiar faces are associated with far more semantic, social and emotional information which enhances recognition
- Thus, recognition of familiar faces (but not unfamiliar) is robust even in different variations in the image of a given person
- Own race effect (Herzmann et al, 2022) -
-> We seem better at recognising faces from our ‘own-race’ - according to research, this is due to a few reasons -
--> Perceptual expertise
--> Social and cultural familiarity
--> Cognitive biases
-> Enhancing exposure to other-race faces may increase familiarity and reduce the other race effect
--> Positive representation could lead to re-shaping our biases and changing stereotypes
-> Own-race faces are encoded more elaboratively - learning many features of the face or whole face
-> Other-race faces are encoded using only selected features of the face, but not the whole face
- Oddball visual search task - looking for the face that does not match; recognition is variable
Ambient facial images and autism (Gedhu et al, 2020):
- Ambient facial images depict individuals from a variety of wide viewing angles, with a range of poses and expressions under different lighting conditions
- Exposure to ambient images is thought to help observers form robust representations of the individuals depicted
- Previous results suggest that autistic people may derive less benefit from exposure to this exemplar variation than non-autistic people
- Gedhu et al (2022) - believe that this is to do with a difference in encoding mechanisms - rather than an issue with learning, autistic individuals seem to have different perceptual input abilities
- The importance of ambient images - smiling (Sutherland et al., 2015)
-> First impressions - rated on the Big 5 vs dominance, approachability and youthful / attractiveness
-> Approachability - openness, extraversion, emotional stability, and agreeableness, related to emotional expression in faces
-> Dominance and approachability - conscientiousness, related to cues of facial maturity, masculinity and strength
--> When forming impressions of strangers from highly varying, naturalistic face photographs, perceivers mainly seem to rely on broad facial cues to approachability, such as smiling
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Understanding prosopagnosia (Pinel & Barnes, 2021)
- It is a failure to recognise faces that is not due to sensory deficit, or verbal or intellectual impairment
- Face blindness
- Prosopagnosics are visual agnosics with a specific difficulty in recognising faces - they know it is a face, but they cannot recognise who it is
- It can be developmental or acquired through brain injury
- Associated with injury to extrastriate visual cortex, perhaps including the fusiform face area (Bears et al., 2016)
-> However, it can result from injury to the ventral occipital lobe, the anterior temporal lobe, located in the right hemisphere (Freiwald et al., 2016)
Domain-specific hypothesis -
- Face recognition is carried out by specialised mechanisms distinct from those used for recognising other objects
- Duchaine et al, 2004 - greebles used in a case study with a child that had developmental prosopagnosia
-> Participant was able to perform normally when completing and engaging with Greebles training, but continued to show impairment when recognising faces in other tasks
Gerlach et al., 2022 (a debate)
If an injury in brain region X impairs face recognition (function A) but not object recognition (function B) and a lesion in brain region Y impairs object recognition but not face recognition
- This is double dissociation - lesions / injuries located in different regions of the brain
If a patient with developmental prosopagnosia (DP) also shows impairments in object recognition, this would be considered an association between face recognition and object recognition
- This is known as an association - when impairments or abilities in one cognitive function are linked to impairments or abilities in another cognitive function
Selective disorders like prosopagnosia could reflect injury to both domain-general and domain-specific cognitive processes, and thus it might not be totally face specific
- One of the hallmark symptoms of prosopagnosia is confusing characters in films, TV shows and/or plays
Facial recognition and social media -
- Social recall - App which could be used to help face recognition
- Self-face perception induced by augmented reality filters
-> Researchers used AR filters to test participants’ self perceptions on different aspects of personality, appeal and intelligence
-> Even small distortions of the face impacted participants self-recognition, reinvigorating the idea that humans are highly attentive to faces and to their own image in particular
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