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TWK: 8th Tübingen Perception Conference
25th - 27th Feb 2005
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Development of Face Recognition: how Important is Social Information?
Cornelia Groß & Gudrun Schwarzer (University of Gießen)
Viewing a face implicates two fundamental psychological processes. The first process concerns the recognition of the identity of a face and the second one implies the perception of information that facilitates social communication. For identification, the invariant structure of a face has to be extracted from fast changing social cues (orientation, emotional expression, facial speech) and has to be compared to existing representations. For the recognition of social cues those easily changeable features like the orientation of a face or emotional expression have to be interpreted meaningfully. Until now, the development of face recognition and the development of the perception of social cues have been investigated in different lines of research. Therefore, the goal of the present contribution is to investigate to what extend both processes interact with each other. The first series of experiments investigated whether 7 month old infants succeed in extracting the structure of a face from different orientations and whether this ability is influenced by the emotional expression of the face. The results showed a significant influence of emotional expression such that infants were not able to extract the structure of a face from different orientations when the faces showed neutral facial expressions. In contrast, infants were well able to do so when the faces showed a positive or a negative facial expression. The second series of experiments examined how structural and social information in a face interact with each other in older children. Five ten year old children and adults were asked to classify faces according to facial identity, emotional expression and facial speech. Reaction times were measured and analyzed. The results revealed an independent processing of facial identity whereas processing of social information like emotional expression or facial speech was influenced by faces’ identity. The results of both series of experiments will be discussed with regard to different neural systems activated by structural and social information of a face. |
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