Abstract
In this study, we explore the automaticity of encoding for different facial characteristics and ask whether it is influenced by face familiarity. We used a matching task in which participants had to report whether the gender, identity, race, or expression of two briefly presented faces was the same or different. The task was made challenging by allowing nonrelevant dimensions to vary across trials. To test for automaticity, we compared performance on trials in which the task instruction was given at the beginning of the trial, with trials in which the task instruction was given at the end of the trial. As a strong criterion for automatic processing, we reasoned that if perception of a given characteristic (gender, race, identity, or emotion) is fully automatic, the timing of the instruction should not influence performance. We compared automaticity for the perception of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Performance with unfamiliar faces was higher for all tasks when the instruction was given at the beginning of the trial. However, we found a significant interaction between instruction and task with familiar faces. Accuracy of gender and identity judgments to familiar faces was the same regardless of whether the instruction was given before or after the trial, suggesting automatic processing of these properties. In contrast, there was an effect of instruction for judgments of expression and race to familiar faces. These results show that familiarity enhances the automatic processing of some types of facial information more than others.
Highlights
In this study, we explore the automaticity of encoding for different facial characteristics and ask whether it is influenced by face familiarity
We introduce a new method that involves using a matching task in which participants report whether sequentially presented images of faces vary in gender, identity, race, or facial expression
We investigated the automaticity of unfamiliar face processing across gender, identity, race, and emotional expression
Summary
We explore the automaticity of encoding for different facial characteristics and ask whether it is influenced by face familiarity. As a strong criterion for automatic processing, we reasoned that if perception of a given characteristic (gender, race, identity, or emotion) is fully automatic, the timing of the instruction should not influence performance. Accuracy of gender and identity judgments to familiar faces was the same regardless of whether the instruction was given before or after the trial, suggesting automatic processing of these properties. There was an effect of instruction for judgments of expression and race to familiar faces These results show that familiarity enhances the automatic processing of some types of facial information more than others. In terms of these criteria, human faces are detected and categorized more quickly than many other nonface objects and even animal faces. The ability to discriminate the identity of different individual faces takes longer, but some studies have sought to demonstrate that this can be achieved within 170 ms (Heisz, Watter, & Shedden, 2006; Jacques & Rossion, 2006; Liu et al, 2002; Sugase et al, 1999; see Schweinberger, Pickering, Burton, & Kaufmann, 2002; Ewbank, Smith, Hancock, & Andrews, 2008)
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