The Philadelphia Face Perception Battery

Abstract

The Philadelphia Face Perception Battery (PFPB) tests four aspects of face perception: discrimination of facial similarity, attractiveness, gender, and age. Calibration with 116 neurologically intact subjects yielded average performance of approximately 90%. Across subjects, there was a low correlation (<0.22) in performance between the tests (with the exception of the attractiveness and age discrimination tests) suggesting that the tests measure independent aspects of face perception. There were modest effects of subject demographic factors upon performance, and test-retest reliability scores (between 0.37 and 0.75) were comparable to other neuropsychological batteries. Modification of the stimuli to obscure internal facial features lowered performance on the age, gender, and attractiveness discrimination tests between 2 and 4 standard deviations. The clinical sensitivity of the battery was demonstrated by testing a patient with acquired prosopagnosia. She showed performance impairments of between 2 and 4 standard deviations on all sub-tests. The PFPB is freely available for non-commercial use.

Variation in White Matter Connectivity Predicts the Ability to Remember Faces and Discriminate Their Emotions

“…These results are not terribly surprising, however, as many studies report significant findings in only some white matter indices (e.g. Thomas et al, 2008). …”

Perceptual Learning of Faces: A Rehabilitative Study of Acquired Prosopagnosia

“…Below were two choice faces, and the task was to indicate with a keyboard press which of these two most resembled the top face. This method aimed at training perceptual rather than memory processes and shares design elements with the Philadephia Face Similarity Test (Thomas, Lawler, Olson, & Aguirre, 2008) and another study of perceptual face training (Bate et al, 2015). The design reflected evidence from previous studies of perceptual learning of faces that suggested an advantage for simultaneous over sequential faces in discrimination tasks (Mundy, Honey, Downing, et al, 2009;Mundy, Honey, & Dwyer, 2007 and better perceptual learning for faces shown alongside similar rather than dissimilar faces (Dwyer & Vladeanu, 2009).…”

Super‐recognizers: From the lab to the world and back again

“… AFRT (Adults Face Recognition Test, Belanvova et al., ); BORB (Birmingham Object Recognition Battery, Humphreys & Riddoch, 1993); BTWF (Before They Were Famous, Russell et al., ); CBT (Change Blindness Test, Smart et al., 2014); CCMT (Cambridge Car Memory Test; Dennett et al., 2011); CFE (Composite Face Effect Robbins & McKone, ); CFMT+ (Cambridge Face Memory Test Long Form; Russell et al., ); CFPT (Cambridge Face Perception Test; Duchaine et al., ); CMT (Crowd Matching Test; Bate et al., ); Ekman 60 (Ekman 60 faces test; Young et al., ); FFRT (Famous Face Recognition Test; Lander et al., ); GFMT (Glasgow Face Matching Test; Burton et al., ); Global Bias Index (Navon, ); IE (Inversion Effect); IFRT (Infant Face Recognition Test, Belanova et al., ) IPIP (International Personality Item Pool Representation of the NEO PI‐R™; Goldberg, 1998); MFMT (Models Face Matching Test; Dowsett & Burton, ); MMT (Models Matching Test, Bate et al., ); NASA‐TLI (National Aeronautics and Space Administration Task Load Index Hart & Staveland, ); Old/New UFMT (Old/New Unfamiliar Memory Test, Davis et al., ); SFCT (Spotting Face in a Crowd Test, Davis et al., ); PFPB (Philadelphia Face Perception Battery; Thomas et al., ); PLT (Pixelated Lookalike Test; Robertson et al., ); PMT (Pairs Matching Test; Bate et al., ); RMITE (Reading the Mind in The Eyes; Baron Cohen et al., ); SIAS (Social Interaction Anxiety Scale, Mattick & Clarke, ); SMT (Sequential Matching Task); STAI‐T (State Trait Anxiety Inventory‐ Trait; Spielberger et al., ); WASI (Wechsler abbreviated Scale of Intelligence; Wechsler ); WTAR (Wechsler Test of Adult Reading; Holdnack, ). …”