Jean-Yves Baudouin

When the smile is a cue to familiarity

The question discussed in the two following experiments concerns the effect of facial expressions on face recognition. Famous and unknown faces with neutral or smiling expression were presented for different inspection durations (15 ms vs 1000 ms). Subjects had to categorise these faces as famous or unknown (Experiment 1), or estimate their degree of familiarity on a rating scale (Experiment 2). Results showed that the smile increased ratings of familiarity for unfamiliar faces (Experiments 1 and 2) and for famous faces (Experiment 2). These data are discussed in the framework of current face-recognition models and are interpreted in terms of social value of the smile. It is proposed that the smiling bias found here acts at the level of the decision process.

Selective attention to facial emotion and identity in schizophrenia.

The selective attention to facial emotion and identity was investigated in 12 patients with schizophrenia and 12 healthy participants. Both patients and controls were required to perform two classification tasks (according either to identity or emotion). Two separate values for identity (person A/person B) and for emotion (fear/anger) were used. When the classification task was on one dimension, the other dimension was either correlated, constant, or orthogonal (Garner WR. The Processing of Information and Structure. Potomac, MD: Erlbaum, 1974, Garner WR. Interaction of stimulus dimensions in concept and choice processes. Cognitive Psychology 1976;8:98-123). Results indicated that both patients and healthy participants had an asymmetrical pattern of performance: they were able to selectively attend to the identity of the face presented, regardless of the emotion expressed on the face, but variation in identity interfered with the classification of facial emotion. Moreover, a correlational study indicated that the identity interference on emotion classification for schizophrenic patients covaried with the severity of their negative symptoms. The selective attention competencies in schizophrenia and the independence hypothesis of emotion and face recognition are discussed in the framework of current face recognition models.

The role of configural information in facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia

The schizophrenia deficit in facial emotion recognition could be accounted for by a deficit in processing the configural information of the face. The present experiment was designed to further test this hypothesis by studying the face-inversion effect in a facial emotion recognition task. The ability of 26 schizophrenic patients and 26 control participants to recognize facial emotions on upright and upside-down faces was assessed. Participants were told to state whether faces expressed one of six possible emotions (happiness, anger, disgust, fear, sadness, neutrality) in two sessions, one with upright faces and the other with upside-down faces. Discriminability and the decision criterion were computed. The results indicated that the schizophrenic patients were impaired in upright facial emotion discrimination by comparison with the controls. They also exhibited an inversion effect similar to the controls. However, whereas controls tended to adopt a more conservative criterion for all emotions and a liberal criterion for neutrality when the faces were upside-down, schizophrenic patients presented a decision criterion pattern that was similar for the two orientations and similar to controls in upside-down emotion recognition. The lack of a decision criterion shift was associated with positive symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, and bizarre behavior. Moreover, positive and negative symptoms were associated with inversion effect on discriminability; the more severe the symptoms, the weaker the inversion effect. We conclude that individuals with schizophrenia do process the configural information of the face. However, further investigations are needed to assert whether this information is of good quality in schizophrenia.

Configural information in gender categorisation

The role of configural information in gender categorisation was studied by aligning the top half of one face with the bottom half of another. The two faces had the same or different genders. Experiment l shows that participants were slower and made more errors in categorising the gender in either half of these composite faces when the two faces had a different gender, relative to control conditions where the two faces were nonaligned or had the same gender. This result parallels the composite effect for face recognition (Young et al, 1987 Perception 16 747–759) and facial-expression recognition (Calder et al, 2000 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 26 527–551). Similarly to responses to face identity and expression, the composite effect on gender discrimination was disrupted by inverting the faces (experiment 2). Both experiments also show that the composite paradigm is sensitive to general contextual interference in gender categorisation.

Gender is a dimension of face recognition.

In an experiment, the authors investigated the impact of gender categorization on face recognition. Participants were familiarized with composite androgynous faces labeled with either a womans first name (Mary) or a mans first name (John). The results indicated that participants more quickly eliminated faces of the opposite gender than faces of the same gender than the face they were looking for. This gender effect did not result from greater similarity between faces of the same gender. Rather, early gender categorization of a face during face recognition appears to speed up the comparison process between the perceptual input and the facial representation. Implications for face recognition models are discussed.

The Nose Tells it to the Eyes: Crossmodal Associations between Olfaction and Vision

Crossmodal linkage between the olfactory and visual senses is still largely underexplored. In this study, we investigated crossmodal olfactory – visual associations by testing whether and how visual processing of objects is affected by the presence of olfactory cues. To this end, we explored the influence of prior learned associations between an odour (eg odour of orange) and a visual stimulus naturally associated with that odour (picture of orange) on the movements of the eyes over a complex scene. Participants were asked to freely explore a photograph containing an odour-related visual cue embedded among other objects while being exposed to the corresponding odour (subjects were unaware of the presence of the odour). Eye movements were recorded to analyse the order and distribution of fixations on each object of the scene. Our data show that the odour-related visual cue was explored faster and for a shorter time in the presence of the congruent odour. These findings suggest that odours can affect visual processing by attracting attention to the possible odour source and by facilitating its identification.

The development of perceptual sensitivity to second-order facial relations in children.

This study investigated childrens perceptual ability to process second-order facial relations. In total, 78 children in three age groups (7, 9, and 11 years) and 28 adults were asked to say whether the eyes were the same distance apart in two side-by-side faces. The two faces were similar on all points except the space between the eyes, which was either the same or different, with various degrees of difference. The results showed that the smallest eye spacing children were able to discriminate decreased with age. This ability was sensitive to face orientation (upright or upside-down), and this inversion effect increased with age. It is concluded here that, despite early sensitivity to configural/holistic information, the perceptual ability to process second-order relations in faces improves with age and constrains the development of the face recognition ability.

Is Face Distinctiveness Gender Based

Two experiments were carried out to study the role of gender category in evaluations of face distinctiveness. In Experiment 1, participants had to evaluate the distinctiveness and the femininity-masculinity of real or artificial composite faces. The composite faces were created by blending either faces of the same gender (sexed composite faces, approximating the sexed prototypes) or faces of both genders (nonsexed composite faces, approximating the face prototype). The results show that the distinctiveness ratings decreased as the number of blended faces increased. Distinctiveness and gender ratings did not covary for real faces or sexed composite faces, but they did vary for nonsexed composite faces. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to state which of two composite faces, one sexed and one nonsexed, was more distinctive. Sexed composite faces were selected less often. The results are interpreted as indicating that distinctiveness is based on sexed prototypes. Implications for face recognition models are discussed.

Compensatory strategies in processing facial emotions: evidence from prosopagnosia.

We report data on the processing of facial emotion in a prosopagnosic patient (H.J.A.). H.J.A. was relatively accurate at discriminating happy from angry upright faces, but he performed at chance when the faces were inverted. Furthermore, with upright faces there was no configural interference effect on emotion judgements, when face parts expressing different emotions were aligned to express a new emergent emotion. We propose that H.J.A.s emotion judgements relied on local rather than on configural information, and this local information was disrupted by inversion. A compensatory strategy, based on processing local face parts, can be sufficient to process at least some facial emotions.

SHOULD THE TEMPORAL CORTEX BE CHOPPED IN TWO

The single-cell recording technique has long been used in attempts to dissociate two regions of the temporal cortex involved in face recognition and facial expression processing. As a classical example, the results obtained by Hasselmo et al. (1989) are frequently quoted in support of this functional dissociation. However a critical analysis of these data and a review of behavioral, neurophysiological, and neuropsychological findings on this topic show that we cannot purely and simply accept the conclusion that the superior temporal sulcus is associated with expression processing, and the inferior temporal cortex, with face recognition.