Face Perception

Unfamiliar face perception:

- The ability to accurately identify faces from photographs is crucial in a variety of environments,
from workplace entry to immigration.
- Despite the reliance on photographic identification, the ability to accurately match between a
photograph and the individual in question is typically poor.

What we know…Identification:
- Recognition for familiar faces is very good (Bahrick et. al. 1975).
- However, recognition for unfamiliar faces is very poor (Bruce et. Al., 1999 Bindemann and
Sandford, 2011) .
- There are lots of differences between unfamiliar and familiar faces that are due to experience
affecting our perception.
- Better memory/matching over display types for familiar as compared to unfamiliar faces.
- Very similar looking people (e.g. identical twins) become easier to discriminate with
experience, but why?
- Intermixed exposure resulted in superior discrimination between sets of morph pairs (Mundy,
Honey and Dwyer, 2007).
- Exposure enhanced discrimination between pairs of faces, compared to a brief exposure even
when changing viewpoint.
- What are the changes that occur as a result of experience?
- Eye movement patterns suggest that familiarity produces more looking at the whole face.
- Familiarity changes the conditions that help or hinder successful recognition (Johnston and
Edmonds, 2009).

Can we improve recognition?:

- Perhaps faces acquire familiarity through a process of perceptual learning whereby exposure to
similar faces enhances our ability to recognise others.
- How?
- Two similar stimuli can be termed as AX and BX, where X is common to both stimuli, and A and
B are unique elements.
- Experience might produce better representations of the features unique to that stimuli (A/B),
and therefore aid discrimination (Gibson, 1969).

Faces:
-Faces convey a great deal of information; identity, age, sex, race, etc.
- Faces are complex stimuli;
- Multiple dimensions.
- Features: eyes, nose, mouth, etc…
- Configurations: spaces among and sizes of face features.
- Faces have exceptional social relevance;
- They capture attention.
- Many areas of the brain respond to face stimuli.
- Inversion effect;
- Turning faces upside down, dramatically reduces recognition.
- turning other stimuli upside down does not do this.

The Thatcher Illusion:

- the thatcher illusion demonstrates that we tend to process faces in a holistic manner.
- If we processed faces as a collection of their parts then we should find it easy to pick out any
changes during inversion.
Brain Regions:
- We know that presenting faces elicits specific electrical signals from the brain.
- Imaging studies reveal stronger activation or certain parts of teh brain when presented with a
face.

ERP: Event related potentials:

- Put surface electrodes on the scalp; record tiny voltages changes.
- Start voltage measurement when a picture onsets.
- Do this many times and then average. The resultant waveform is called an ERP.
An ERP signature for faces is N170:
- N170 is more obvious with face pictures than other objects
- Assumed to reflect structural encoding because it does not vary with:
- Expression,
- familiarity,
- viewpoint
- But….not all studies agree.
- N170 may be also caused by expertise or simply by highly similar stimuli

Face Perception - Expertise:

- Using checkerboard stimuli it has been demonstrated that the inversion effects can be found
when given exposure to exemplars from a familiar category (McLaren, 1997).
- Extending this finding Civille et. Al. (2014) demonstrated that the inversion effect can be
demonstrated in an old/new memory task, similar to those used in face perception.

Summary:
- Faces are a remarkably special stimulus type, but perhaps it is the volume of faces that we
experience that makes them so special.
- The goal of experimental psychology is to design experiments, that take advantage of these
perceptual effects to help address these types of understanding.
- Eventually leading to a better understanding of the way we perceive and process faces.