FACE RECOGNITION
Face recognition is a very important aspect of social functioning. Most faces are broadly
similar, in spite of this we are very good at distinguishing between different faces. Even if the
face is unfamiliar we make certain judgements e.g. mood, general age and gender. Bruce took
photos of a large number of men and women - to avoid obvious cues of gender, men were
closely shaved, women had no make- up and they all wore swimming caps to conceal their
hair. Participants were 96% accurate.
We are better at recognising faces we are familiar with – Bahrick gave lecturers set of photos
and asked them to pick the students they had taught from those they had never taught.
Recognition was good immediately after the end of term but dropped significantly after a
year and only chance after 8 years. Suggesting exposure to faces needs to be maintained. One
reason we are good at recognising familiar faces is that we have the opportunity to view
them from different angles and so build up a more complete mental picture.
Is face recognition special?
Yes
Infant preferences for faces – Fantz –babies as young as 4 days old showed a preference for a
schematic face rather than jumbled up or blocked. If face preference is innate it would make
sense as it would be adaptive – a newborn who recognises and responds to its own species
will better elicit attachment and caring. But the results from study could be because infants
prefer symmetry and interesting pictures. See also studies of people with prosopagnosia.
Would be adaptive e.g. recognising an enemy, your own child, decoding facial expressions.
MRI scans of brain activity show that the fusiform gyrus became more active when subjects
looking at faces than when looking at other objects. Suggesting this area of the brain is
specialised for processing faces.
No
Faces are quite similar so high level cognitive processing is needed to differentiate them.
Gauthier – used MRI to record brain activity of people who were shown pictures of birds and
cars and were asked to identify type of bird/car. Found fusiform area also active during this
task, suggesting area not dedicated to faces. Experts in bird/car recognition used this area to
identify different categories, we are all experts at recognising faces. So suggests fusiform area
is specialised for the recognition of any object category for which we possess expertise. Other
support – we find it harder to recognise faces of people from other races – probably due to
our lack of experience/expertise. If fusiform area is specialised for expert processing then
people e.g. who are car experts should find it difficult to carry out a face recognition task and
a car recognition task at the same time. People who are not car experts should be able to do
both at same time as only face recognition task would need fusiform activity. Gaithier found
that this was exactly what happened.
THEORIES OF FACE RECOGNITION
How do you recognise people?
Do we use feature analysis. Comparing each feature of the face with a stored list of features.
Shepherd, Davies and Ellis briefly showed participants unfamiliar faces and later asked them
to describe the faces seen. Features most frequently recalled in order were, hair, eyes, nose,
mouth, eyebrows, chin and forehead. Few mentioned shape of face or expression. But there
are problems with a simple feature-based theory. Yin – inversion effect, could recognise
pictures of objects turned upside down as easily as right way up, but not faces. Suggestion is
that upside down impairs holistic processing but not feature analysis, so face must be
processed in a holistic way. Bruce and Valentine – scrambled faces of celebrities, scrambled
faces harder to identify than normally configured faces – again suggesting we find it easier to
process faces holistically – top-down theory.
Bruce and Young’s theory of face recognition
View centered
descriptions
Expression
analysis
Structural
encoding
Facial speech
analysis
Expressionindependent
descriptions
Face
recognition
units(FRU’s)
Directed visual
processing
Person
identity
nodes (PIN’s)
Cognitive system
Name
generation/retriev
al units (NRU’s)