Session Detail

Matching unfamiliar faces is an important task in security and forensic settings but research has shown that it is error prone. This study uses a gaze-contingent paradigm to explore the efficacy of focusing on isolated features during face matching. A pair of faces was presented at the same time and observers had to indicate whether they depict the same identity or two different identities. In the windows condition, only a single fixated facial feature was available at a time. In the mask condition, the fixated facial feature was masked while making the rest of the face visible. In the control condition, full faces were presented. Results showed that observers were better in the control condition than in the windows or mask condition. Furthermore, performance in the mask condition was significantly better than in the windows condition. These data showed that focusing on isolated features does not help face matching.

Other-race effect (ORE) refers to that people recognize or memorize own-race faces better than other-race faces. Although ORE is reliably demonstrated across ethnicity, biracial faces are rarely explored. We aimed to explore the effect of essentialist thinking on perceiving and categorizing racially ambiguous faces in Taiwanese young children. Sixty 3~6-year-old children and thirty adults performed categorization of biracial individuals’ faces in two conditions: Asian/White (own- and other-race) and Black/White (both other-race) biracial faces. In each condition, children performed three tasks: the on-line Categorization Task and the Crayon Task, and the Constancy Task (to divide children as essentialist/non-essentialist thinker); adults performed the on-line Categorization Task only. About one-third of children employed essentialist thinking on race. For the Asian/White condition, adults and the children with essentialist thinking(N=22) tended to categorize the ambiguous faces as White (other-race), whereas the children with non-essentialist thinking(N=38) categorized the ambiguous faces to both races evenly. This observation is consistent with the previous study with White children. For the Black/White condition, all the participants tended to categorize the biracial faces as White, which is a novel finding. The present study provided cross-cultural evidence exploring the effect of essentialist thinking on children’s perception and categorization of racially ambiguous faces.

Face memory processes are thought to be largely domain specific. By contrast, music and language perception are driven by processes linked to domain general aspects of face perception, including the own race bias, that is, better discrimination of your own race’s faces over others. We tested these hypotheses in a series of tasks using developmental prosopagnosia cases, who suffer from lifelong impairments in face memory, and matched controls. In our controls and DP cases, we found that increasing bilingual proficiency diminished the own race bias, that is, better recognition of your own race faces over others. We also found further links between language, music and face perception that were apparent in our DP cases, but not our controls. By contrast, face memory performance in itself was not related to language or musical ability across all participants. These findings indicate that prosopagnosia cases can be useful in highlighting domain general links between face, music and language perception that are typically obscured in those with intact face recognition abilities. We propose that the superior temporal sulcus is the most likely neural region linking these domains. Our findings have important theoretical implications for current models of face perception and social cognition.

Despite accumulating evidence pointing a massive long-term memory capacity for objects and places, little is known about the capacity limit for faces. Here, we report behavioral experiments that demonstrate highly limited but efficient memory mechanisms for human faces in a large population (N > 900). Participants viewed pictures of various faces and objects one at a time. Afterward, they were shown an image and asked to indicate whether they had seen it. Although the memory capacity for objects drawn from distinct categories was actually massive, that for faces was only 10 and was not affected by the number of items to-be-remembered and race of the face. Nevertheless, face recognition performance was superior to the recognition performance for single-category items with comparable physical characteristics (in terms of isometry, topology, and entropy). These results indicate that it is orientation-dependent tuning to typical human-face (geometric) morphology that confers an advantage for the limited but efficient memory storage for faces—an object category with subtle visual differences amongst themselves. Our findings not only pose a major challenge for long-term memory models in which the storage capacity is almost limitless but also necessitate a reevaluation of face recognition models, which have long presumed own-race-biased expertise.

Face recognition and memory entail not only encoding the perceptual input of a face upon its presence but also retrieving a relatively permanent representation in spite of variations in illumination, pose, or expression. A network of face-selective regions has been identified as the core system of face processing, including OFA, FFA, and pSTS. Moreover, recent studies have proposed that ventral route of face processing should end at the anterior temporal lobes (vATLs), which may play an important role in connecting face perception and memory. Here we examined whether neural activity in the core system and vATLs can predict performance on face recognition and memory. We first identified during the functional scan the core face network by asking participants to perform a one-back task, while viewing either static images or dynamic videos. They then performed a variety of tasks tapping face recognition and face memory. Results revealed that participants with greater BOLD signals in FFA and vATL demonstrated better performance on holistic processing. Furthermore, greater stability in creating face representation in the right vATL exhibited better performance on face memory. These findings suggested individual differences in the generation of invariant face representation can predict behavioural performance on face recognition and memory.

The degree of distinctiveness between emotions is not uniform. A disgust face is often recognized as an angry face. We aimed to investigate why this confusion occurs. We confirmed previous studies that participants were more likely to confuse disgust with anger while asking them to judge the category of the facial expressions (Experiment 1). We adopted affective priming paradigm in which a 33 ms prime face was presented and found an angry prime would facilitated participants’ performance to judge a disgust target face (Experiment 2). This priming effect was also shown when the prime was an upper-half angry face (Experiment 3A), but however, no such effect was found in lower-half condition (Experiment 3B). When we increased the presented time of a prime 33ms to 100ms, the priming effect was eliminate (Experiment 4). Collectively, our findings suggest the confusion stems from the upper part of a face. We suspect that it may be resulted from overlapping of the facial features on upper half faces between anger and disgust.