Sensing of Feeling and "Kansei". Indirect Measurement of Feature Saliency in Face Processing.

Abstract

This article introduces a newly devised orienting task and discusses its utility in face processing research. In a pilot study investigating feature saliency, subjects were presented with a series of line-drawn faces and were asked to select 10 of their favorite faces, or 10 faces that were most similar to a particular target. The line-drawn faces were randomly selected from a pool of nearly 60, 000 different faces, which were drawn by choosing one of 3 possible values for each of 10 facial features (i. e., 310 possible faces). Assuming that the subjects would select faces with consistent values for important features, the relative importance of facial features may be assessed by comparing the amount of variance “tolerated” by the subjects for each feature. We found that, for example, in similar face retrieval, the variance was significantly smaller for eyebrow tilt, eye shape, and face shape than for other features such as eyebrow position, eye position, or nose length. The utility of the present orienting task is discussed in terms of what these experimental results reveal about feature saliency.