Faces

Question 1

Infant face vision:

Answer 1

babies seem to be born with a predisposition to processing faces

Detection of faces in infants < 1 hr old (preference for faces over ‘scrambled’ faces)

Recognition / discrimination of identity (2 day olds track picture of their own mother vs other plausible mothers

Question 2

Composite face effect

Answer 2

When you put two halves of a face together, it seems to make a whole new face, difficult to ignore the composite half.
Humans can’t avoid processing faces as wholes (holistic processing).

Question 3

Part/whole effect

Answer 3

Participants do better at determining which feature is the one that matches, when its put into the context of the whole face.

Question 4

Inversion effect

Answer 4

Humans have a preference for observing and discriminating between up-right faces (seen in the thatcher illusion)

Inversion effect disrupts holistic processing
inability to extract expression

Question 5

Neurophysiology of faces

Answer 5

Subsection of the infertotemporal cortex called the Fusiform face area responds to faces.
Damage to it causes prosopagnosia

but argument that the FFA lights up to anything that a person has expertise in (greebles experiment)

Question 6

Familiarity in face perception

Answer 6

Familiar faces: recognition or matching performance is good, independent of viewpoint, lighting, expression

Unfamiliar faces: recognition or matching performance is poor and image specific

Question 7

Internal and exxternal features

Answer 7

With familiar faces, the things that stays the same is the internal features of your face (eyes, nose, mouth) and they are more reliable at signalling identity

External features change (hair, hairline, chin, ears, beard)

Question 8

Face adaptation

Answer 8

Can adapt to an orientation of the face
Can adapt to the ‘sex’ of a face

occurs also in body image disturbance