Holistic Representations of Internal and External Face Features are Used to Support Recognition

Chan, Jessica; Ryan, Jennifer D.

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00087

Cited by 14 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…In particular, wearing a hijab obscures external features (such as hair and ears) which are naturally visible when viewing an unoccluded human face. Moreover, humans do not process faces as a collection of distinct facial features but rather as an integrated perceptual whole [ 30 , 31 ], and external features, like hair and ears, play an important role in this process ([ 7 , 32 ]; see also the external feature processing advantage [ 33 ]). For example, Toseeb and colleagues [ 7 , 32 ] found that wearing the hijab produces substantial differences in the way uncovered faces are recognized, and concluded that the external features of a face play an important role in face recognition and that facial processing changes when these features are not visible.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating the effect of wearing the hijab: Perception of facial attractiveness by Emirati Muslim women living in their native Muslim country

Sheen

Yekani

Jordan³

2018

PLoS ONE

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The Hijab and other forms of Islamic veiling are important social, cultural, and religious symbols that are central to the identity of millions of Muslim women across the world. However, despite the large body of literature that exists on the political and socio-cultural aspects of Islamic veiling, little is known about how the appearance of women wearing the hijab is perceived by other Muslim women within their native Muslim country. To throw light on this important issue, the current study focussed on the effects of the hijab on female facial attractiveness perceived by practising Muslim Emirati women living in their native Muslim country (the United Arab Emirates) who themselves wore the hijab as everyday attire. Participants were shown frontal-head images of women in three different conditions: covered (heads fully covered by the hijab except for the face), partially covered (heads fully covered by the hijab except for the face and the hair around the forehead) and uncovered (heads with no covering). The findings showed that faces in images where heads were covered and partially covered by the hijab were rated as equally attractive but both were rated as significantly less attractive than faces in images where heads were uncovered. These findings suggest that, even for practising Muslim Emirati females living in their native Muslim country for whom wearing the hijab is a normal aspect of everyday life, perception of facial attractiveness is compromised by wearing this garment. We argue that this effect of wearing the hijab is not consistent with a preference for one's own cultural group (cultural endogamy) and may, instead, occur because wearing a hijab occludes external features, such as hair and ears, which normally contribute to the perception of human facial attractiveness. In sum, while wearing the hijab may be dominated by male attitudes towards suppressing female attractiveness towards males, the findings from this study suggest that female Muslims too perceive the negative influence of wearing the hijab on female facial attractiveness.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating the effect of wearing the hijab: Perception of facial attractiveness by Emirati Muslim women living in their native Muslim country

Sheen

Yekani

Jordan³

2018

PLoS ONE

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“…It is well known that positive emotions lead to greater holistic processing of faces, whereas negative emotions are linked with feature-based processing ( Curby et al, 2012 ). Given that memory representation of face is holistic ( Chan and Ryan, 2012 ; Heptonstall et al, 2013 ), a test face with a happy expression should facilitate, whereas a test face with an angry expression should impair the retrieval process in an identity recognition task. Our results were consistent with this interpretation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Facial expression at retrieval affects recognition of facial identity

Chen

Liu

et al. 2015

Front. Psychol.

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It is well known that memory can be modulated by emotional stimuli at the time of encoding and consolidation. For example, happy faces create better identity recognition than faces with certain other expressions. However, the influence of facial expression at the time of retrieval remains unknown in the literature. To separate the potential influence of expression at retrieval from its effects at earlier stages, we had participants learn neutral faces but manipulated facial expression at the time of memory retrieval in a standard old/new recognition task. The results showed a clear effect of facial expression, where happy test faces were identified more successfully than angry test faces. This effect is unlikely due to greater image similarity between the neural training face and the happy test face, because image analysis showed that the happy test faces are in fact less similar to the neutral training faces relative to the angry test faces. In the second experiment, we investigated whether this emotional effect is affected by the expression at the time of learning. We employed angry or happy faces as learning stimuli, and angry, happy, and neutral faces as test stimuli. The results showed that the emotional effect at retrieval is robust across different encoding conditions with happy or angry expressions. These findings indicate that emotional expressions do not only affect the stages of encoding and consolidation, but also the retrieval process in identity recognition.

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“…Considering this, the present study revisits the issue of SF tuning for upright and inverted faces while taking into account two additional ecologically relevant parameters that may influence SF tuning: the presence of natural facial contour and face size. Given that external facial features such as natural facial contours do contain information useful for face identification (Ellis, Shepherd, & Davies, 1979;Chan & Ryan, 2012;Hills, Romano, Davies-Thompson, & Barton, 2014; but see Butler, Blais, Gosselin, Bub, & Fiset, 2010), it is possible that real-world differences between upright and inverted face SF processing were missed in previous studies using smaller face stimuli. Thus, we investigate in Experiment 1 the, to the best of our knowledge, unexplored issue of the role of natural facial contour in the SF tuning of upright and inverted faces.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

The influence of natural contour and face size on the spatial frequency tuning for identifying upright and inverted faces

Royer

Willenbockel

Blais

et al. 2016

Psychological Research

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It has previously been proposed that holistic face processing is based on low spatial frequencies (SFs) whereas featural processing relies on higher SFs, a hypothesis still widespread in the face processing literature today (e.g. Peters et al. in Eur J Neurosci 37(9):1448-1457, 2013). Since upright faces are supposedly recognized through holistic processing and inverted faces, using features, it is easy to take the leap to suggest a qualitatively different SF tuning for the identification of upright and vs. inverted faces. However, two independent studies (e.g. Gaspar et al. in Vision Res 48(28):2817-2826, 2008; Willenbockel et al. in J Exp Psychol Human 36(1):122-135, 2010a) found the same SF tuning for both stimulus presentations. Since these authors used relatively small faces hiding the natural facial contour, it is possible that differences in the SF tuning for identifying upright and inverted faces were missed. The present study thus revisits the SF tuning for upright and inverted faces face identification using the SF Bubbles technique. Our results still indicate that the same SFs are involved in both upright and inverted face recognition regardless of these additional parameters (contour and size), thus contrasting with previous data obtained using different methods (e.g. Oruc and Barton in J Vis 10(12):20, 1-12, 2010). The possible reasons subtending this divergence are discussed.

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Holistic Representations of Internal and External Face Features are Used to Support Recognition

Cited by 14 publications

References 35 publications

Investigating the effect of wearing the hijab: Perception of facial attractiveness by Emirati Muslim women living in their native Muslim country

Investigating the effect of wearing the hijab: Perception of facial attractiveness by Emirati Muslim women living in their native Muslim country

Facial expression at retrieval affects recognition of facial identity

The influence of natural contour and face size on the spatial frequency tuning for identifying upright and inverted faces

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