The effects of visual degradation on face discrimination

Abstract

Poor face discrimination has a profound impact on real-life social communication. Here we report that artificial visual degradation also adversely impacts a synthetic face recognition task. As a rule of thumb, reduction in VA of 0.3 logMAR (halving the decimal VA) reduces the face recognition distance by a factor of 0.6 times. The FrACT-based face discrimination task provides an efficient new tool to quantify and monitor face discrimination ability.

Age Differences in Face Processing: The Role of Perceptual Degradation and Holistic Processing

“…Our results are consistent with McCulloch et al (2011) andOwsley et al (1981) in showing that manipulating perceptual signal strength influences face processing in aging. Cronin-Golomb et al (2007) found that enhancing or degrading stimulus contrast did not influence performance of YA and OA on the Benton Face Recognition Test (BFRT).…”

“…These results are consistent with our findings with LSF faces and suggest that reducing signal strength may or may not produce age-related effects depending on the type of image manipulation employed. Unlike the present study and those by McCulloch et al (2011) andOwsley et al (1981), Cronin-Golomb et al (2007) included acuity as a covariate in their analysis. Further discussion is needed on whether basic measures of vision should be included as covariates in studies on visual cognition.…”

“…While the finding that SF filtering reduces performance on face tasks has been widely reported in YA (Boutet et al, 2003;Collin, Liu, Troje, McMullen, & Chaudhuri, 2004), our study is the first to report age-related differences in the impact of SF filtering. While correlations between ageassociated low-level vision loss and face processing have been reported elsewhere (Lott et al, 2005;Norton et al, 2009), our study is among a few that have used experimental methods to investigate this link (Croning-Golomb et al, 2007;McCulloch et al, 2011;Owsley et al, 1981). The difficulty for MA and OA to match HSF faces probably arises from age-associated loss in processing HSF information, as indicated by reduced acuity and contrast sensitivity in the HSF range, losses which are evident in OA even after vision has been corrected (Cronin-Golomb et al, 2007).…”

Do Patients with Glaucoma Have Difficulty Recognizing Faces?

“…Nevertheless, some studies, using different experimental designs to the one reported here, disagree that contrast sensitivity is important for face recognition and suggest that loss of VA is more debilitating. 17,18,44,51 All the same, the participants in our sample had relatively good acuity (6/9 or better), so it is possible that these results are underestimating the true impact of VA loss on facerecognition performance. It is also important to note that the central 10-2 IVF and PRlogCS accounted for less than half of the variation in facial-recognition performance (R 2 ¼ 39%).…”

“…Yet, obviously, these features will play some role in real-life face recognition. Still, the CFMT is a validated test that has been used in a variety of clinical situations 33,51,52 and was developed based on the strengths of other face-recognition tests that were already widely used in research. The test also simulates how faces would be learned in the real-world, by allowing participants to gradually acquire information about the faces from a variety of different viewpoints and build up more detailed representations in memory.…”