Week 2 Flashcards
How do we perceive faces?
We recognize facial features better in the context of a whole face rather than in isolation (Tanaka & Farah, 1993)
- Its hard to recognize lips, nose, eyes, ears individually, You need to holistically look at the face.
- Goren et al. (1975) found that newborns (mean age 9 minutes!) track face-like patterns more than control patterns containing rearrangements of the same features.
- This suggests that face processing is innate.
- At 2 days old, newborns can discriminate between the face of their mother and the face of strangers (Bushnell et al., 1989)
- Given that newborns sleep roughly 85% of the time during their first few days, newborns require very little time to show a preference for their mother
Babies and kids perceive face feature by feature.
By the time you’re an adult you can recognise a face as a whole rather than feature by feature
What is Featural processing and Configural processing?
Featural information: The local information contained in individual parts (e.g., shape of nose, colour of eyes)
Configural information: The spatial interrelationship between those parts (e.g., spacing between eyes, distance from nose to upper lip)
What do faces tell us?
Faces provide a reliable index of health (Kalick et al., 1998)
More attractive people:
- live longer (Henderson & Anglin, 2003)
- have better physical health (Langlois et al., 2000)
- have better mental health (Feingold, 1992
- You can tell if there in a health issue/developmental issues at times
What is the Face inversion effect?
- When an object is upside down (inverted), it’s harder to recognise
- Inversion interferes with configural processing, as demonstrated by the Thatcher (or Obama!) illusion (Thompson, 1980)
- Inverting the mouth and eyes looks grotesque when the image is upright, but is the grotesqueness is not perceived when the image is inverted
- This suggests that configural information is difficult to extract when the face is upside-down
Summary:
- Faces are important social stimuli, so humans pay great attention to faces from birth (face processing is innate)
- According to Bruce & Young’s (1986) model, familiar faces are recognised by matching with stored FRUs (face recognition units). Semantic information is then retrieved via PINs (personal identity nodes)
- Averaged faces appear prototypical and are perceived as more attractive; attractiveness is a reliable index of health (mental & physical) and mating success
- Faces differ in their featural information: the local information contained in individual parts (e.g., shape of nose, colour of eyes)
- Faces differ in the configural information: the spatial interrelationship between the parts
- Non-face objects tend to be processed feature-by-feature, whereas configural processing is the hallmark of adult face perception
- Inversion interferes with configural processing, and thus has a greater effect on face processing than processing of other objects (e.g., Thatcher illusion)
Williams Syndrome
Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic
disorder (1/25,000) causing a variety of
medical and developmental problems
Associated with very low IQ (~50), with
serious deficits in spatial cognition, numbers,
planning, and problem-solving, but fluent and
articulate language and face processing
Indeed, infants with WS pay far more attention
to faces than objects (Bellugi et al., 2000)
Karmiloff-Smith (1997) argues that the extra attention to faces
allows people with WS to attain normal face processing scores,
however their strategies differ – adults with WS and normal controls
do not differ in measures of featural face matching, however the WS
adults were significantly worse on matching tasks requiring
configural processing
Derulle et al. (1999) asked people with WS (ages 7-23) and
chronological age-matched (CA) and mental age-matched (MA)
controls to determine whether pairs of faces were the same or
different in normal and reversed orientations
They found that people with WS showed less of an inversion effect
than the controls, consistent with reliance on featural rather than
configural analysis
Autism Spectrum Disorders
People with Autism Spectrum Disorders
(ASD) show difficulties in reciprocal social
interaction and communication, as well as
differences in face processing (Webb et al.,
2017; Gangi et al., 2018)
People with ASD don’t pay attention to faces
(Pavolva et al., 2017), and this face
inattention is evident from infancy (Jones &
Klin, 2013; Macari et al., 2021)
Children with ASD are delayed in attaining face-related social
milestones (e.g., looking at another’s face to share
experience/gauge reaction; e.g., Sasson, 2006)
Like people with Williams syndrome, people with ASD process faces
atypically, having difficulty with holistic face processing and instead
relying on featural processing (Hartson et al., 2023)
Schizophrenia
patients with schizophrenia exhibit deficits in perceiving faces
(e.g., Bediou et al., 2005)
Martin et al. (2005) asked patients with schizophrenia
(hospitalised) and neurotypical controls to determine whether pairs
of photos were the same person or different people
Results indicated that people with schizophrenia were significantly slower than control participants in making the ‘same/different’ decision
People with schizophrenia also made more face recognition errors than control participants
Capgras Syndrome
Capgras syndrome (Capgras delusion) : delusion that certain other people, usually close relatives, have been replaced by imposters (Young, 2000), e.g., secret services, Martians, robots, clones
First described by French psychiatrist Joseph Capgras in his 1923 paper about “Madame M”
Patients often recognize their claim as difficult for others to believe, but this does not stop them believing it
Prosopagnosia
Prosopagnosia: selective inability to recognize familiar faces visually (face blindness)
Recognition is instead triggered by other cues e.g., voice, clothing, hair, gait
Patients’ other perceptual and cognitive functions are typically intact
“Associative” prosopagnosia reflects breakdown of FRUs, PINs or the links between them.
Unlike patients with apperceptive prosopagnosia, associative prosopagnosics
can match faces and recognize facial emotions, however they cannot link this information to semantic knowledge about the person
