Abstract
Facial recognition is key to social interaction, however with unfamiliar faces only generic information, in the form of facial stereotypes such as gender and age is available. Therefore is generic information more prominent in unfamiliar versus familiar face processing? In order to address the question we tapped into two relatively disparate stages of face processing. At the early stages of encoding, we employed perceptual masking to reveal that only perception of unfamiliar face targets is affected by the gender of the facial masks. At the semantic end; using a priming paradigm, we found that while to-be-ignored unfamiliar faces prime lexical decisions to gender congruent stereotypic words, familiar faces do not. Our findings indicate that gender is a more salient dimension in unfamiliar relative to familiar face processing, both in early perceptual stages as well as later semantic stages of person construal.
Highlights
Faces are important social stimuli that help us identify friend from foe
As social categories are the most useful information we can get from unfamiliar faces, we propose that category information is more salient and prioritized in terms of processing
Recognition has been proposed to occur via a specialised face recognition processing route comprised of face recognition units (FRUs) and person identity nodes (PINs) [2,3], which is activated after even the briefest of exposure to a familiar face [4,5]
Summary
Faces are important social stimuli that help us identify friend from foe. In most everyday interactions, facial recognition serves as a platform upon which our interactions with the individual in question are based. Unfamiliar faces do not provide rich specific information about an individual, they do offer plenty of useful generic information such as social category membership (e.g., gender, age, and race) This information can activate stored information about category groups allowing a best guess at the appropriate manner of interaction [1]. According to the IAC model [3], activated PINs trigger related semantic information units (SIUs) that store personal information about the face This entire face recognition process is proposed to occur separately to the processing of other information about the face such as expression or social category information such as gender. In this case whether or not a face is familiar, gender categorisation would be the same but truncated for unfamiliar faces as specific information doesn’t exist for them
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