The minimal duration required for face perception

Perception, 2011

2007

Perceiving, learning, and recognizing faces swiftly and accurately is of paramount importance to humans as a social species. Though established functional models of face cognition 1,2 suggest the existence of multiple abilities in face cognition, the number of such abilities and the relationships among them and to other cognitive abilities can only be determined by studying individual differences. Here we investigated individual differences in a broad variety of indicators of face cognition and identified for the first time three component abilities: face perception, face memory, and the speed of face cognition. These component abilities were replicated in an independent study and were found to be robustly separable from established cognitive abilities, specifically immediate and delayed memory, mental speed, general cognitive ability, and object cognition. The analysis of individual differences goes beyond functional and neurological

1998

east begin to see where some of these potential lines of inquiry may lie.The psychological concepts that we believe readers will find familiar in this chapterconcern issues of measurement, representation, and task demands. These are issuesencountered in nearly all models of psychological phenomena. Specifically, we will ask thefollowing kinds of questions. How do you measure the information in a stimulus

Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2011

2 The author would like to thank Thomas Ditye and Valentin Gattol for helping to conduct the experiments, Helmut Leder for providing help on prestudies conducted for this experiment, and three anonymous reviewers plus Doug Ammons, who provided very helpful valuable information for improving the paper.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010

Recognizing faces swiftly and accurately is of paramount importance to humans as a social species. Individual differences in the ability to perform these tasks may therefore reflect important aspects of social or emotional intelligence. Although functional models of face cognition based on group and single case studies postulate multiple component processes, little is known about the ability structure underlying individual differences in face cognition. In 2 large individual differences experiments (N ϭ 151 and N ϭ 209), a broad variety of face-cognition tasks were tested and the component abilities of face cognition-face perception, face memory, and the speed of face cognition-were identified and then replicated. Experiment 2 also showed that the 3 face-cognition abilities are clearly distinct from immediate and delayed memory, mental speed, general cognitive ability, and object cognition. These results converge with functional and neuroanatomical models of face cognition by demonstrating the difference between face perception and face memory. The results also underline the importance of distinguishing between speed and accuracy of face cognition. Together our results provide a first step toward establishing face-processing abilities as an independent ability reflecting elements of social intelligence.

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2014

Previous observations that face recognition may proceed automatically, without drawing on attentional resources, have been challenged by recent demonstrations that only a few faces can be processed at one time. However, a question remains about the nature of stimulus properties that underlie face-specific capacity limits. Two experiments show that speeded categorisation of a famous face (such as a politician or pop star) is facilitated when it is congruent with a peripheral distracter face. This congruency effect is eliminated if the visual search is loaded with more than one face, unlike demonstrations of speeded classification using semantic information. Importantly, congruency effects are also eliminated when the search task is loaded with non-target faces that are shown in an inverted orientation. These results indicate that face-specific capacity limits are not determined by the configural ('holistic') properties of face recognition. Face Specific Capacity Limits 3 Can we recognize a face when we are not paying attention to it? Faces are highly relevant social stimuli, and there is evidence that they may be processed almost 'automatically', that is faster than other non-face objects and presumably without conscious awareness (Young, Ellis, Flude, McWeeny, & Hay, 1986). Importantly, 'automatic' processes are deemed to be mandatory, meaning that face recognition cannot be prevented intentionally (Wojciulik, Kanwisher, & Driver, 1998), and capacity-free, in the sense that they require only minimal attentional resources (Schneider & Chien, 2003). The current study is concerned with the conditions that determine boundaries for automatic face processing.

Behavior Research Methods, 2008

Perception, 2005

Neuroreport, 2001

Electrophysiological responses to previously seen faces reportedly differ from those to novel faces at shorter latencies than generally associated with complex visual analysis. It is unclear, however, whether such observations are unique to faces, and which stages of visual processing they re¯ect. MEG was used in 21 normal adults to record neural responses to images of faces, other objects and abstract patterns presented individually as part of a classi®cation task and in sequential pairs as part of an image comparison task. The amplitudes of the short latency responses (30±60 ms) to the ®rst image in pairs of faces were signi®cantly greater than the responses to both the second faces and the individual face images. These early responses were recorded over predominantly right hemisphere parietal and occipito-temporal cortical regions including areas that, at longer latencies, have been associated with face speci®c activity. The differences in the responses within pairs were less for non-face objects and absent for abstract geometrical patterns. No early neuronal activity was observed in the classi®cation task. The results indicate the existence of early latency neural networks that are sensitive to both stimulus type and task and are strongly activated by faces. NeuroReport 12:1531±1536 &

Frontiers in Psychology, 2013

Face recognition is supposed to be fast. However, the actual speed at which faces can be recognized remains unknown. To address this issue, we report two experiments run with speed constraints. In both experiments, famous faces had to be recognized among unknown ones using a large set of stimuli to prevent pre-activation of features which would speed up recognition. In the first experiment (31 participants), recognition of famous faces was investigated using a rapid go/no-go task. In the second experiment, 101 participants performed a highly time constrained recognition task using the Speed and Accuracy Boosting procedure. Results indicate that the fastest speed at which a face can be recognized is around 360-390 ms. Such latencies are about 100 ms longer than the latencies recorded in similar tasks in which subjects have to detect faces among other stimuli. We discuss which model of activation of the visual ventral stream could account for such latencies. These latencies are not consistent with a purely feed-forward pass of activity throughout the visual ventral stream. An alternative is that face recognition relies on the core network underlying face processing identified in fMRI studies (OFA, FFA, and pSTS) and reentrant loops to refine face representation. However, the model of activation favored is that of an activation of the whole visual ventral stream up to anterior areas, such as the perirhinal cortex, combined with parallel and feed-back processes. Further studies are needed to assess which of these three models of activation can best account for face recognition.