Spontaneous trait inferences are bound to actors' faces: Evidence from a false recognition paradigm.

A false recognition paradigm showed that spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) are bound to the person performing a trait-implying behavior. In 6 experiments, participants memorized faces and behavioral sentences. When faces were paired with implied traits in a recognition test, participants falsely recognized these traits more often than unrelated traits paired with the same faces or the same traits paired with familiar faces. The effect was obtained for a large set of behaviors (120), each presented for 5 sec, and for behaviors that participants did not subsequently recognize or recall. Antonyms of the implied traits were falsely recognized less often than unrelated traits, suggesting that STIs have extended implications. Explicit person-trait judgments predicted both false recognition and response times for implied traits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of dynamic information in the recognition of unfamiliar faces

The effects of movement on unfamiliar face recognition were investigated. In an incidental learning task, faces were studied either as computer-animated (moving) displays or as a series of static images, with identical numbers of frames shown for each. The movements were either nonrigid transformations (changes in expression) or rigid rotations in depth (nodding or shaking). At test, participants saw either single, static images or moving sequences. Only one experiment showed a significant effect of study type, in favor of static instances. There was no additional advantage from studying faces in motion in these experiments, in which both study types showed the same amounts of information. Recognition memory was relatively unaffected by changes in expression between study and test. Effects of viewpoint change were large when expressive transformations had been studied but much smaller when rigid rotations in depth had been studied. The series of experiments did reveal a slight advantage for testing memory with moving compared with static faces, consistent with recent findings using familiar faces. Future work will need to examine whether such effects may also be due to the additional information provided by an animated sequence.     

Biased allocation of faces to social categories.

Three studies show that social categorization is biased at the level of category allocation. In all studies, participants categorized faces. In Studies 1 and 2, participants overallocated faces with criminal features—a stereotypical negative trait—to the stigmatized Moroccan category, especially if they were prejudiced. On the contrary, the stereotype-irrelevant negative trait stupid did not lead to overallocation to the Moroccan category. In Study 3, using the stigmatized category homosexual, the previously used negative trait criminal—irrelevant to the homosexual stereotype—did not lead to overallocation, but the stereotype-relevant positive trait femininity did. These results demonstrate that normative fit is higher for faces with stereotype-relevant features regardless of valence. Moreover, individual differences in implicit prejudice predicted the extent to which stereotype-relevant traits elicited overallocation: Whereas more negatively prejudiced people showed greater overallocation of faces associated with negative stereotype-relevant traits, they showed less overallocation of faces associated with positive stereotype-relevant traits. These results support our normative fit hypothesis: In general, normative fit is better for faces with stereotypical features. Moreover, normative fit is enhanced for prejudiced individuals when these features are evaluatively congruent. Social categorization thus may be biased in itself. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Why we respond faster to the self than to others? An implicit positive association theory of self-advantage during implicit face recognition.

Human adults usually respond faster to their own faces rather than to those of others. We tested the hypothesis that an implicit positive association (IPA) with self mediates self-advantage in face recognition through 4 experiments. Using a self-concept threat (SCT) priming that associated the self with negative personal traits and led to a weakened IPA with self, we found that self-face advantage in an implicit face-recognition task that required identification of face orientation was eliminated by the SCT priming. Moreover, the SCT effect on self-face recognition was evident only with the left-hand responses. Furthermore, the SCT effect on self-face recognition was observed in both Chinese and American participants. Our findings support the IPA hypothesis that defines a social cognitive mechanism of self-advantage in face recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Structural resemblance to emotional expressions predicts evaluation of emotionally neutral faces.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 9(4) of Emotion (see record 2009-11528-009). In this article a symbol was incorrectly omitted from Figure 1, part C. To see the complete article with the corrected figure, please go to http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0014681.] People make trait inferences based on facial appearance despite little evidence that these inferences accurately reflect personality. The authors tested the hypothesis that these inferences are driven in part by structural resemblance to emotional expressions. The authors first had participants judge emotionally neutral faces on a set of trait dimensions. The authors then submitted the face images to a Bayesian network classifier trained to detect emotional expressions. By using a classifier, the authors can show that neutral faces perceived to possess various personality traits contain objective resemblance to emotional expression. In general, neutral faces that are perceived to have positive valence resemble happiness, faces that are perceived to have negative valence resemble disgust and fear, and faces that are perceived to be threatening resemble anger. These results support the idea that trait inferences are in part the result of an overgeneralization of emotion recognition systems. Under this hypothesis, emotion recognition systems, which typically extract accurate information about a person's emotional state, are engaged during the perception of neutral faces that bear subtle resemblance to emotional expressions. These emotions could then be misattributed as traits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Correction to Said, Sebe, and Todorov (2009).

Reports an error in "Structural resemblance to emotional expressions predicts evaluation of emotionally neutral faces" by Christopher P. Said, Nicu Sebe and Alexander Todorov (Emotion, 2009[Apr], Vol 9[2], 260-264). In this article a symbol was incorrectly omitted from Figure 1, part C. To see the complete article with the corrected figure, please go to http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0014681. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2009-04472-011.) People make trait inferences based on facial appearance despite little evidence that these inferences accurately reflect personality. The authors tested the hypothesis that these inferences are driven in part by structural resemblance to emotional expressions. The authors first had participants judge emotionally neutral faces on a set of trait dimensions. The authors then submitted the face images to a Bayesian network classifier trained to detect emotional expressions. By using a classifier, the authors can show that neutral faces perceived to possess various personality traits contain objective resemblance to emotional expression. In general, neutral faces that are perceived to have positive valence resemble happiness, faces that are perceived to have negative valence resemble disgust and fear, and faces that are perceived to be threatening resemble anger. These results support the idea that trait inferences are in part the result of an overgeneralization of emotion recognition systems. Under this hypothesis, emotion recognition systems, which typically extract accurate information about a person's emotional state, are engaged during the perception of neutral faces that bear subtle resemblance to emotional expressions. These emotions could then be misattributed as traits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Positive and negative emotion enhances the processing of famous faces in a semantic judgment task.

Previous work has consistently reported a facilitatory influence of positive emotion in face recognition (e.g., D’Argembeau, Van der Linden, Comblain, & Etienne, 2003). However, these reports asked participants to make recognition judgments in response to faces, and it is unknown whether emotional valence may influence other stages of processing, such as at the level of semantics. Furthermore, other evidence suggests that negative rather than positive emotion facilitates higher level judgments when processing nonfacial stimuli (e.g., Mickley & Kensinger, 2008), and it is possible that negative emotion also influences latter stages of face processing. The present study addressed this issue, examining the influence of emotional valence while participants made semantic judgments in response to a set of famous faces. Eye movements were monitored while participants performed this task, and analyses revealed a reduction in information extraction for the faces of liked and disliked celebrities compared with those of emotionally neutral celebrities. Thus, in contrast to work using familiarity judgments, both positive and negative emotion facilitated processing in this semantic-based task. This pattern of findings is discussed in relation to current models of face processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intact implicit memory for newly formed verbal associations in amnesic patients following single study trials.

This study examines the ability of amnesic patients to recover newly formed associations implicitly after a single study trial. Fifteen amnesic patients with various etiologies studied pairs by forming a sentence containing both words. At test, all participants saw 40 intact pairs, 40 rearranged pairs, and 40 new words. All pairs appeared side by side both at study and at test. For the implicit lexical-decision task, 40 nonwords were intermixed with the other pairs, and participants indicated whether both items were words. For the explicit speeded recognition test, participants were asked to indicate whether both words had appeared at study. Despite being severely impaired on the explicit test, amnesic patients performed like healthy controls on the implicit test, with faster and more accurate responses to intact pairs than to recombined pairs. Contrary to existing theories, the results suggest that amnesic patients can form and retain new associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Associative recognition of face pairs by younger and older adults: The role of familiarity-based processing.

Previous research suggested that older adults have a specific impairment in remembering verbal associative information, but it is unclear how elaboration and familiarity might influence this deficit in situations that involve perceptual processing. In the present experiments, younger and older participants studied male-female pairs of faces. Participants were then administered an associative recognition test consisting of previously studied pairs, pairs that contained previously studied items that were not studied together (i.e., conjunction pairs), and entirely new pairs of faces, and participants were instructed to identify pairs that had been presented together at study. Overall, participants were successful at recognizing previously presented pairs but were highly likely to mistakenly endorse conjunction pairs. This pattern was more pronounced for older adults, especially when items were repeated at encoding. Such data suggest that memory for face pairs relies largely on the familiarity of each face and not on a more precise recollection of associative information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Local and relational aspects of face distinctiveness

Distinctiveness contributes strongly to the recognition and rejection of faces in memory tasks. In four experiments we examine the role played by local and relational information in the distinctiveness of upright and inverted faces. In all experiments subjects saw one of three versions of a face: original faces, which had been rated as average in distinctiveness in a previous study (Hancock, Burton, & Bruce, 1996), a more distinctive version in which local features had been changed (D-local), and a more distinctive version in which relational features had been changed (D-rel). An increase in distinctiveness was found for D-local and D-rel faces in Experiment 1 (complete faces) and 3 and 4 (face internals only) when the faces had to be rated in upright presentation, but the distinctiveness of the D-rel faces was reduced much more than that of the D-local versions when the ratings were given to the faces presented upside-down (Experiments 1 and 3). Recognition performance showed a similar pattern: presented upright, both D-local and D-rel revealed higher performance compared to the originals, but in upside-down presentation the D-local versions showed a much stronger distinctiveness advantage. When only internal features of faces were used (Experiments 3 and 4), the D-rel faces lost their advantage over the Original versions in inverted presentation. The results suggest that at least two dimensions of facial information contribute to a face's apparent distinctiveness, but that these sources of information are differentially affected by turning the face upside-down. These findings are in accordance with a face processing model in which face inversion effects occur because a specific type of information processing is disrupted, rather than because of a general disruption of performance.     

The effect of age on memory for emotional faces.

Prior studies of emotion suggest that young adults should have enhanced memory for negative faces and that this enhancement should be reduced in older adults. Several studies have not shown these effects but were conducted with procedures different from those used with other emotional stimuli. In this study, researchers examined age differences in recognition of faces with emotional or neutral expressions, using trial-unique stimuli, as is typically done with other types of emotional stimuli. They also assessed the influence of personality traits and mood on memory. Enhanced recognition for negative faces was found in young adults but not in older adults. Recognition of faces was not influenced by mood or personality traits in young adults, but lower levels of extraversion and better emotional sensitivity predicted better negative face memory in older adults. These results suggest that negative expressions enhance memory for faces in young adults, as negative valence enhances memory for words and scenes. This enhancement is absent in older adults, but memory for emotional faces is modulated in older adults by personality traits that are relevant to emotional processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recognition memory measures yield disproportionate effects of aging on learning face-name associations.

No previous research has tested whether the specific age-related deficit in learning face-name associations that has been identified using recall tasks also occurs for recognition memory measures. Young and older participants saw pictures of unfamiliar people with a name and an occupation for each person, and were tested on a matching (in Experiment 1) or multiple-choice (in Experiment 2) recognition memory test. For both recognition measures, the pattern of effects was the same as that obtained using a recall measure: More face-occupation associations were remembered than face-name associations, young adults remembered more associated information than older adults overall, and older adults had disproportionately poorer memory for face-name associations. Findings implicate age-related difficulty in forming and retrieving the association between the face and the name as the primary cause of obtained deficits in previous name learning studies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recollections of faces: remembering differences and knowing similarities

Components of recollective experience were investigated in 4 experiments in which participants studied either similarities or differences among faces (relational vs. distinctive processing). Subsequently, when recognizing a face, participants indicated whether their decision was based on explicit recollection (remembering) or assessment of familiarity (knowing). Type of encoding interacted with judgments of recollective experience, so that the incidence of "remember" responses was higher following distinctive encoding than following relational encoding, whereas the opposite pattern of results was obtained for "know" responses. Furthermore, recognition of appearance-changed faces was based on feelings of familiarity, rather than on explicit recollection. The results support the dual-component notion of recognition but are inconsistent with the idea that dissociations between remembering and knowing merely reflect differences in conceptual and perceptual processing.     

It's not what you say but the way you say it: Matching faces and voices.

Recent studies have shown that the face and voice of an unfamiliar person can be matched for identity. Here the authors compare the relative effects of changing sentence content (what is said) and sentence manner (how it is said) on matching identity between faces and voices. A change between speaking a sentence as a statement and as a question disrupted matching performance, whereas changing the sentence itself did not. This was the case when the faces and voices were from the same race as participants and speaking a familiar language (English; Experiment 1) or from another race and speaking an unfamiliar language (Japanese; Experiment 2). Altering manner between conversational and clear speech (Experiment 3) or between conversational and casual speech (Experiment 4) was also disruptive. However, artificially slowing (Experiment 5) or speeding (Experiment 6) speech did not affect cross-modal matching performance. The results show that bimodal cues to identity are closely linked to manner but that content (what is said) and absolute tempo are not critical. Instead, prosodic variations in rhythmic structure and/or expressiveness may provide a bimodal, dynamic identity signature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Encoding Operations and Recognition Memory for Faces.

Two experiments examined the effects of encoding operations on forced-choice recognition memory for upright and inverted photographs of faces. In Experiment 1, with distractors closely matched to targets, performance was better on upright than on inverted faces, but was unaffected by whether subjects judged faces for distinctive features, distinctive traits or distinctive expressions. In Experiment 2, where distractors were either absent or weakly matched to distractors, accuracy was again higher on upright than on inverted faces, and was similar for the three encoding operations on upright faces. In contrast, it was poorer for distinctive expression judgments than for distinctive feature or for distinctive trait judgments on inverted faces. These results support Winograd's (1981) claim that distinctive feature and distinctive trait judgments both lead to the isolation of distinctive features. However, it was argued that distinctive expression judgments led to configural processing that was disrupted by inversion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Biased recognition of positive faces in aging and amnestic mild cognitive impairment.

We investigated age differences in biased recognition of happy, neutral, or angry faces in 4 experiments. Experiment 1 revealed increased true and false recognition for happy faces in older adults, which persisted even when changing each face’s emotional expression from study to test in Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, we examined the influence of reduced memory capacity on the positivity-induced recognition bias, which showed the absence of emotion-induced memory enhancement but a preserved recognition bias for positive faces in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment compared with older adults with normal memory performance. In Experiment 4, we used semantic differentials to measure the connotations of happy and angry faces. Younger and older participants regarded happy faces as more familiar than angry faces, but the older group showed a larger recognition bias for happy faces. This finding indicates that older adults use a gist-based memory strategy based on a semantic association between positive emotion and familiarity. Moreover, older adults’ judgments of valence were more positive for both angry and happy faces, supporting the hypothesis of socioemotional selectivity. We propose that the positivity-induced recognition bias might be based on fluency, which in turn is based on both positivity-oriented emotional goals and on preexisting semantic associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult attachment and the perception of facial expression of emotion.

Adult attachment orientation has been associated with specific patterns of emotion regulation. The present research examined the effects of attachment orientation on the perceptual processing of emotional stimuli. Experimental participants played computerized movies of faces that expressed happiness, sadness, and anger. Over the course of the movies, the facial expressions became neutral. Participants reported the frame at which the initial expression no longer appeared on the face. Under conditions of no distress (Study 1), fearfully attached individuals saw the offset of both happiness and anger earlier, and preoccupied and dismissive individuals later, than the securely attached individuals. Under conditions of distress (Study 2), insecurely attached individuals perceived the offset of negative facial expressions as occurring later than did the secure individuals, and fearfully attached individuals saw the offset later than either of the other insecure groups. The mechanisms underlying the effects are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Human and chimpanzee face recognition in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): Role of exposure and impact on categorical perception.

The respective influences of exposure and inborn neural networks on conspecific and nonconspecific face processing remain unclear. Although the importance of exposure in the development of object and face recognition in general is well documented, studies explicitly comparing face recognition across species showed a species-specific effect. For instance, laboratory monkeys exposed daily to human faces were better at discriminating monkeys than humans, suggesting that the role of exposure may not be the only factor affecting cross-species recognition. In the present study, the authors investigated conspecific and nonconspecific face recognition in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) from 2 primate centers that provided different exposure to chimpanzee and human faces. The authors showed that the chimpanzees from the center providing more exposure to human faces than to chimpanzee faces were better at discriminating human faces than they were at discriminating chimpanzee faces. The chimpanzees from the other center did not show the same effect. A computational simulation was developed to evaluate the average similarities among human pictures and among chimpanzee pictures. Both categories were comparable. Chimpanzees' scores were significantly correlated with the similarity coefficients. Overall, the results show that exposure is a critical determinant in conspecific and nonconspecific face recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Deficits in other-race face recognition: No evidence for encoding-based effects.

The other-race effect (ORE) in face recognition is typically observed in tasks which require long-term memory. Several studies, however, have found the effect early in face encoding (Lindsay, Jack, & Christian, 1991; Walker & Hewstone, 2006). In 6 experiments, with over 300 participants, we found no evidence that the recognition deficit associated with the ORE reflects deficits in immediate encoding. In Experiment 1, with a study-to-test retention interval of 4 min, participants were better able to recognise White faces, relative to Asian faces. Experiment 1 also validated the use of computer-generated faces in subsequent experiments. In Experiments 2 through 4, performance was virtually identical to Asian and White faces in match-to-sample, immediate recognition. In Experiment 5, decreasing target-foil similarity and disrupting the retention interval with trivia questions elicited a re-emergence of the ORE. Experiments 6A and 6B replicated this effect, and showed that memory for Asian faces was particularly susceptible to distraction; White faces were recognised equally well, regardless of trivia questions during the retention interval. The recognition deficit in the ORE apparently emerges from retention or retrieval deficits, not differences in immediate perceptual processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)