The recognition of faces and expressions

Abstract

The accuracy offace recognition was compared with that for expressional recognition. A series of 16 pictures of faces was presented for inspection. The series comprised 8 pictures of smiling faces and 8 pictures of neutral faces. The expressions were presented in random order in Condition 1. Condition 2 involved the block presentation of expression. In a recognition test that followed 5 days later, the levels of both facial and expressional recognition were assessed. Face recognition was significantly better than expressional recognition under both conditions. In addition, Condition 1 produced significantly better expressional recognition than did Condition 2. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.Various studies have shown that features contained in the upper portion of the face are used more reliably for purposes of facial recognition and identification than lower region features are. Such studies cut across the infant, child, and adult literature.With regard to infants, Bushnell (1982) used a habituationrecovery design to show that 5-week-old babies were capable of discriminating between photographs of their mothers and of strangers. These babies were able to discriminate between mothers and strangers by processing certain contour information, specifically, the boundary separating the hair from the face. By the 19th week of age, infants came to rely on information regarding the eyes in making such discriminations. These findings were fully consistent with the face scanning data of Hainline (1978) and Maurer and Salapatek (1976). Thus, it would appear that the features located in the upper half of the face contained all of the information that infants required for face recognition. Similar findings were obtained with young children.Goldstein and Mackenberg (1966) tested kindergarten, first -, and fifth-grade children for recognition of familiar faces. The children were shown pictures of 13 of their classmates, whom they had to identify. However, each of the 13 pictures was masked in a different fashion. The highest recognition levels were obtained for pictures in which the eyes and hair were exposed in some combination, and low recognition levels were gotten with the exposure of lower region feature combinations. There have been similar findings for adults.McKelvie (1976) used a masking procedure with adults to assess their ability to recognize pictures of previously exposed unfamiliar faces. He found that whereas masking the eyes seriously impaired face recognition, masking the mouth had virtually no detrimental effect. Although it is clear in the literature that subjects perform accurately on This research is based on a dissertation that was submitted in partial fulfIllment of the doctoral requirements at St. John's University. Requests for reprints should be sent to L. Brosgole, Psychology Laboratory, St. John's University, Jamaica, NY 11439. face recognition tasks by using features located in the upper half of the face, a question emerges with respect to the extent to which the feat...

The effects of happy and angry expressions on identity and expression memory for unfamiliar faces

“…In particular, recognition performances tend to differ depending on whether learning is intentional or incidental (see Coin & Tiberghien, 1997 for a review). In the present study, we examined if the influence of emotional expressions on identity and expression memory can also be modulated by encoding activity, which was not possible in previous studies because learning was always intentional (Cohen-Pager & Brosgole, 1992;Foa et al, 2000;Kottoor, 1989). To do this, the faces were encoded intentionally by half the participants and incidentally by the other half.…”

“…Kottoor found that faces with a smiling expression were recognized better than faces with a neutral or pout expression. Memory for emotional expressions themselves was investigated by Cohen-Pager and Brosgole (1992). Participants were asked to learn neutral and smiling faces and the recognition test consisted of pairs of photos which included a photo that had been seen during inspection and either a photo of a different person (two-person condition) or a photo of the same person with a different expression (two-expression condition).…”

Short-term memory for emotional faces in dysphoria

“…Models of face processing generally assume that identity recognition and expression recognition involve independent subprocesses which are neuropsychologically and experimentally distinct (Bruce & Young, 1986;Haxby, Hoffman & Gobbini, 2000). However, recent research suggests that there may be an interaction between the processing of emotional expression and facial identity, with memory for an individual's identity and recall of their emotional expression both being influenced by the nature of the facial expression (Cohen-Pager & Brosgole, 1992;D'Argembeau, Van der Linden, Comblain & Etienne, 2003;Foa, Gilboa-Schechtman, Amir & Freshman, 2000). Further, Jermann et al.…”