Discriminability of different parts of faces

Abstract

Two face-recognition studies were run, in which different groups of subjects were presented with photographs of fully exposed faces, faces with their lower halves masked, and faces with their upper halves masked. In the first experiment, subjects were shown a series of 50 pictures of 50 different people and had to keep a mental tally of how many different people were shown. The presentation of such a series produced a confusion among faces, resulting in errors’ being made in the final tallies given. The greatest number of errors (lowest tallies) was associated with masking the upper halves of the faces, and the fewest (highest tallies) occurred with no masking. Similar results were obtained in the second experiment, when subjects had to sort a set of 25 different facial stimuli into piles, with each pile supposedly containing pictures of the same person. The smallest number of piles was created when the upper halves of the faces were masked, and the largest number, with no masking. The finding that intrusion errors were associated primarily with the lower region of the face supports the proposition that faces are most distinctive in the upper half and most similar in the lower portion.