Week 11 - Face perception

Question 1

When does face perception start

Answer 1

Infants follow face like paddles from minutes of birth (Johnson et al. 1991)

Question 2

Do different external factors affect facial recognition>

Answer 2

Facial recognition can occur across variations in facial expressions, pose, and lightning conditions.
- Occlusion of face/head parts do not prevent us from recognising faces
- We ‘see’ faces everywhere in our environment (e.g. face pareidolia - Wardle et al., 2003)
- Faces can be recognised from severly blurred images

Super recognisers exist.

Prosopagnosia = when an individual cannot recognise a face

Question 3

People with face processing impairments report having profound difficulties in life

Answer 3

• Severe face recognition difficulties despire normal low-level vision and intellect
• Can be associated with brain damage or present from birth (congenital/developmental)

Question 4

Do we use spacing information to recognise faces?

Answer 4

If spacial relations are cruical, they should reliably help us discriminate between individuals.

Question 5

What is the composite face effect

Young et al., 1987

Answer 5

We seem to process face holisticallu i.e. as a single perceptual unit
- Not just as parts and spacing information

Question 6

What affects our ability to recognise faces?

Answer 6

1. Whats in a face (coding of facial information)
2. Whats in the observers head (e.g. experiences)

Question 7

Why are other races difficult to recognize?

Answer 7

Perception: other race faces are coded less holistically than own-race faces (e.g., Michel et al., 2006)

Contact: Experience tunes and refines our face processing system to fit our ‘diet’ of faces (Hancock and Rhodes, 2008)

Social categorisation: attend to identity-diagnostic features for same-race faces but category-diagnostic features for other-race faces (Hugenberg et al., 2010)