Face Drawing Research Articles

Face drawing experience is associated with better face recognition performance and reduced left-side bias in face perception

Recent research in computer vision showed that while both analytic (local) and holistic (global) approaches perform well in face recognition, the fusion of the two yields the best performance. Professional face artists/caricaturists mastering both the drawing of individual facial features and whole faces may engage in such fused processing of faces, and thus may excel in face recognition. Zhou et al. (2012) found that art students with face drawing experience showed weaker holistic face processing than non-drawers; nevertheless, the two groups did not differ in sequential face-matching performance. Here we recruited professional face artists, in contrast to art students, in a simultaneous face-matching task with unfamiliar faces that differed in illumination, pose, disguise and expression. In contrast to sequential face-matching, our task reduces the involvement of visual short-term memory, as face artists' advantage is more likely to be in their perceptual ability than in memory. We recruited 15 face artists and 15 non-drawers. Before the experiment, participants drew a face within 15 minutes. An experienced face artist rated participants' expertise according to the drawings. We found that face artists outperformed non-drawers in the simultaneous face-matching task (t(28) = 2.56, p <.05). Face drawing expertise was positively correlated with face recognition performance (r = 0.38, p <.05). In addition, while non-drawers judged a face made from two left half-faces more similar to the original face than one from two right half-faces, i.e., the left side bias (right hemisphere dominance) in face perception, face artists had a reduced bias than non-drawers (t(28) = -2.39, p <.05), suggesting reduced global face processing. Face drawing expertise was negatively correlated with the bias (r = -0.47, p <.05). Together, the results suggest that face drawing expertise may shift attention from global to local, which may help face recognition in challenging tasks. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014

Neuronal responses to face-like and facial stimuli in the monkey superior colliculus

The superficial layers of the superior colliculus (sSC) appear to function as a subcortical visual pathway that bypasses the striate cortex for the rapid processing of coarse facial information. We investigated the responses of neurons in the monkey sSC during a delayed non-matching-to-sample (DNMS) task in which monkeys were required to discriminate among five categories of visual stimuli [photos of faces with different gaze directions, line drawings of faces, face-like patterns (three dark blobs on a bright oval), eye-like patterns, and simple geometric patterns]. Of the 605 sSC neurons recorded, 216 neurons responded to the visual stimuli. Among the stimuli, face-like patterns elicited responses with the shortest latencies. Low-pass filtering of the images did not influence the responses. However, scrambling of the images increased the responses in the late phase, and this was consistent with a feedback influence from upstream areas. A multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis of the population data indicated that the sSC neurons could separately encode face-like patterns during the first 25-ms period after stimulus onset, and stimulus categorization developed in the next three 25-ms periods. The amount of stimulus information conveyed by the sSC neurons and the number of stimulus-differentiating neurons were consistently higher during the 2nd to 4th 25-ms periods than during the first 25-ms period. These results suggested that population activity of the sSC neurons preferentially filtered face-like patterns with short latencies to allow for the rapid processing of coarse facial information and developed categorization of the stimuli in later phases through feedback from upstream areas.

“Please Draw Me a Face…” Atypical Face Mental Concept in Autism

Autism is a severe neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by early manifestations of social difficulties and atypical sensory-based behaviors. As faces are essential for social interaction, they have been widely investigated in autism, revealing disruptions in face processing. Cognitive theories argue that people with autism process the world differently, showing a processing bias for local information. However, the literature currently neglects the mental representation of faces, or face concept, in people with ASD. The current study sought to establish how young children with ASD “see” a human face. A key question is whether this face concept is a function of cognitive style and/or sensory impairment. By comparing simple face drawings in young children with ASD, with those of deaf children and controls, we highlight an atypical face concept in ASD that does not show, however, global processing deficits: face drawing presents a preserved overall configuration. The atypical face drawings in children with ASD showed similarities with those of deaf children: eyes were not an essential feature, whereas a marked interest for ears and non-facial external features (accessories, body parts) was shown. These findings suggest that the face mental concept in ASD may be impacted by sensory processing deficits.

日本のセルアニメにおけるキャラクタの振り向き動作時の顔描画に関する分析(視聴覚の基礎と応用,マルチモーダル,感性情報処理,一般)

日本のセルアニメにおけるキャラクタの振り向き動作時の顔描画に関する分析(視聴覚の基礎と応用,マルチモーダル,感性情報処理,一般)

When Words Are Not Enough: A Validated Nonverbal Vocabulary of Feelings (Pictured Feelings Instrument)

Although nonverbal expressions in face and body are our primary means of communicating emotional feelings, word‐based instruments dominate in clinical/counselling, health, education, and research. Picture‐based instruments usually contain four to eight facial expressions of age‐, gender‐, and ethnic‐specific posed photos validated by multiple or forced choice, which may not be relevant for people of other demographics. We report the development, free‐choice validation and initial applications of a multipurpose nonverbal instrument designed for people to communicate their feelings and show recognition of a broad range of feelings. The Pictured Feelings Instrument, a nonverbal vocabulary of feelings, comprises 26 face and/or body line drawings of pictured feelings (PFs), which are intentionally ambiguous regarding age, gender, and ethnicity, but feeling‐specific (e.g., love, sad, victimised, strong, overloaded). Studies with 325 Australians found high validity and reliability: Adults validated all 26 PFs, and younger groups (12 and under) validated 22–24 PFs, similar to pilot study results in Hawaii. Methodologically, we use free‐choice naming for validation; we use images of face and body/context to express feelings in their appropriate modalities. Uses in psychology, medicine, education, rehabilitation, and research are discussed.

Attention network test — The impact of social information on executive control, alerting and orienting

According to the attention network approach, attention is best understood in terms of three functionally and neuroanatomically distinct networks — alerting, orienting, and executive attention. An important question is whether social information influences the efficiency of these networks. Using the same structure as the Attentional Network Test (ANT), we developed a variant of this test to examine attentional effects in response to stimuli with and without social-cognitive content. Fish, drawings or photographs of faces looking to the left or right were used as target stimuli. Results collected from twenty-four university students showed that photographs of faces positively affected attentional orienting and executive control, whereas reduced the efficiency of alerting, as compared to both face drawings and fish. These results support the status of human faces as a special class of visual stimuli for the human attentional systems.

Portrait drawing by Paul the robot

We describe Paul, a robotic installation that produces observational face drawings of people. Paul is a naive drawer: it does not have highlevel knowledge of the structures constitutive of the human face (such as the mouth, nose, eyes) nor the capability of learning expertise based on experience as a human would. However, Paul is able to draw using the equivalent of an artist's stylistic signature based on a number of processes mimicking drawing skills and technique, which together form a drawing cycle. Furthermore, we present here our first efforts in implementing two different versions of visual feedback to permit the robot to iteratively augment and improve a drawing which initially is built from a process of salient lines recovery. The first form of visual feedback we study we refer to as computational as it involves a purely internal (memory-based) representation of regions to render via shading by the robot. The second version we call physical as it involves the use of a camera as an ‘eye’ taking new snapshots of the artefact in progress. This is then analysed to take decisions on where and how to render shading next. A main point we emphasise in this work is the issue of embodiment of graphical systems, in our case in a robotic platform. We present our arguments in favour of such a position for the graphics community to reflect upon. Finally, we emphasise that the drawings produced by Paul have been considered of interest by fine art professionals in recent international art fairs and exhibitions, as well as by the public at large. One drawing is now in the Victoria and Albert museum collection. We identify a number of factors that may account for such perceived qualities of the produced drawings.

Влияние эмоциональной экспрессии нерелевантного лицевого изображения на опознание зрительных стимулов

In 34 healthy subjects we have analyzed accuracy and reaction time (RT) during the recognition of complex visual images: pictures of animals and non-living objects. The target stimuli were preceded by brief presentation of masking non-target ones, which represented drawings of emotional (angry, fearful, happy) or neutral faces. We have revealed that in contrast to accuracy the RT depended on the emotional expression of the preceding faces. RT was significantly shorter if the target objects were paired with the angry and fearful faces as compared with the happy and neutral ones. These effects depended on the category of the target stimulus and were more prominent for objects than for animals. Further, the emotional faces' effects were determined by emotional and communication personality traits (defined by Cattell's Questionnaire) and were clearer defined in more sensitive, anxious and pessimistic introverts. The data are important for understanding the mechanisms of human visual behavior determination by non-consciously processing of emotional information.

Holistic Face Processing is Induced by Shape and Texture

There is increasing evidence that shape and texture are integral parts of face identity. However, it is less clear whether face-specific processing mechanisms are triggered by face shape alone, or if texture might play an important role. We address this question by studying mechanisms involved in holistic face processing. Face stimuli were either full-color pictures of real faces (shape and texture) or line drawings of the same faces (shape without texture). In a change detection task subjects judged whether eyes and eyebrows in two otherwise identical, sequentially presented faces were different in size or not. Afterwards, subjects had to identify the just presented face among two distractor faces (forced-choice identification task). The results obtained from the two tasks give rise to the conclusion that face identification and change detection tasks engage different processing strategies, which capture different aspects of holistic processing. Real faces were processed holistically, irrespective of task requirements, whereas line drawings were processed holistically only if face identification was required. On the basis of the data we conclude that face shape is relevant for the initial processing stage and feature binding, whereas face texture seems to be involved in processing of face configuration more specifically. Moreover, results demonstrate considerable flexibility of the face processing systems allowing for goal-directed and task-specific recall of face information.

未知顔の潜在記憶──間接再認手続きによる長期持続性の検討──

We examined whether people can retain an implicit memory for unfamiliar faces over several weeks by using an indirect recognition procedure (Terasawa & Ohta, 1993). The procedure was composed of two sessions with a long-term interval. Two experiments using different intervals--19 days (Experiment 1) and 7 weeks (Experiment 2)--were conducted. In each session, participants were presented with line drawings of faces and were asked to rate their preferences. The number of presentations varied for each condition in the first session. Participants were also asked to perform an unexpected recognition test for the faces presented after the rating task in the second session. Results from both experiments showed that the rates of correct and false recognition of faces increased significantly with the number of presentations in the first session. The findings indicate that long-lasting implicit memory can be formed for unfamiliar faces by incidental learning.

Children’s Gender Stereotypes Through Drawings of Emotional Faces: Do Boys Draw Angrier Faces than Girls?

The present study was designed to examine the impact of display rules and gender-emotion stereotypes on French children’s depiction of sadness and anger in their drawings of a human face. Participants were 172 school-aged French children (74 boys and 98 girls), who attended state schools in a middle-class district of a southern French city. The exact age range was as followed: 6 years 2 months to 8 years 1 month. They were asked to draw the emotion felt by a character (either male or female) after being told a scenario eliciting sadness and a scenario eliciting anger. By never mentioning the emotion felt by the character, we expected children’s interpretation of these scenarios to be therefore influenced by their own gender and/or by the character’s gender. Results indicate that anger is depicted by more boys than girls in response to the angry scenario, for male as well as for female characters. Furthermore, among the children who did depict anger, the expressive intensity of the drawings was scored lower for children who were presented the feminine character than for children who were presented the masculine character. However, no effect of gender was found on the drawings produced in response to the sad scenario. These results are discussed in terms of the influence of display rules and gender-emotion stereotypes on children. We also suggest some methodological and clinical implications.

Neuronal responses to face‐like stimuli in the monkey pulvinar

The pulvinar nuclei appear to function as the subcortical visual pathway that bypasses the striate cortex, rapidly processing coarse facial information. We investigated responses from monkey pulvinar neurons during a delayed non-matching-to-sample task, in which monkeys were required to discriminate five categories of visual stimuli [photos of faces with different gaze directions, line drawings of faces, face-like patterns (three dark blobs on a bright oval), eye-like patterns and simple geometric patterns]. Of 401 neurons recorded, 165 neurons responded differentially to the visual stimuli. These visual responses were suppressed by scrambling the images. Although these neurons exhibited a broad response latency distribution, face-like patterns elicited responses with the shortest latencies (approximately 50 ms). Multidimensional scaling analysis indicated that the pulvinar neurons could specifically encode face-like patterns during the first 50-ms period after stimulus onset and classify the stimuli into one of the five different categories during the next 50-ms period. The amount of stimulus information conveyed by the pulvinar neurons and the number of stimulus-differentiating neurons were consistently higher during the second 50-ms period than during the first 50-ms period. These results suggest that responsiveness to face-like patterns during the first 50-ms period might be attributed to ascending inputs from the superior colliculus or the retina, while responsiveness to the five different stimulus categories during the second 50-ms period might be mediated by descending inputs from cortical regions. These findings provide neurophysiological evidence for pulvinar involvement in social cognition and, specifically, rapid coarse facial information processing.

Does Rey Complex Figure Copy Performance Measure Executive Function in Children?

The Rey Complex Figure Task (RCFT) is currently utilized with both adult and child clinical populations. In addition to the measurement of visual–constructional ability and memory, the RCFT has also been suggested as a measure of executive function (EF), specifically requiring planning and organizing skills. The purpose of the current study was to determine the extent to which the RCFT Copy task, using the scoring system developed by Meyers and Meyers (1995), tapped components of EF. The participants in this study were 108 children (M age = 12.61 years; SD = 2.27) who were administered a battery of neuropsychological measures including the RCFT Copy, NEPSY Tower and Arrows subtests, Clock Face Drawing, and a measure of verbal fluency, in addition to other measures of visual–motor integration and cognitive ability. Overall, in this clinically mixed population, scores on the RCFT Copy correlated significantly only with overall cognitive ability, Block Design, and visual–motor integration scores. Implications of these results are discussed.

Is there a role for clock face drawing in palliative care: time will tell?

BackgroundSeveral tools exist to assist screening and diagnosis of cognitive impairment, including the Abbreviated Mental Test; Mini-Mental State Examination; Confusion Assessment Method; and, clock-drawing test (CDT). There are now around...

Smaller holistic processing of faces associated with face drawing experience

The type of experience involved with an object category has been regarded as one important factor in shaping of the human object recognition system. Laboratory training studies have shown that different kinds of learning experience with the same set of novel objects resulted in different perceptual and neural changes. Whether this applies to natural real-world objects remains to be seen. We compared two groups of observers who had different learning experiences with faces, using holistic processing as a dependent measure. We found that, while ordinary observers had extensive individuation experience with faces and displayed typical holistic face processing, art students who had acquired additional experience in drawing faces, and thus in attending to parts of a face, showed less holistic processing than did ordinary observers. These results converge with laboratory training studies on the role of type of experience in the development of different perceptual markers for different object categories. It is thus insufficient to categorize expertise simply in terms of object domains (e.g., expertise with faces). Instead, perceptual expertise should be classified in terms of the underlying process or task demand.

Z margin srednjeveških rokopisov

Shortly after the mid-thirteenth century, various images began to fill the margins in both religious and secular texts. Many factors influenced the emergence of this type of manuscript decoration, but it has generally been attributed to the revived interest in nature and the Gothic inclination for humorous and anecdotic detail. After highlighting other possible reasons for the occurrence of marginal illumination, this paper introduces two manuscripts from the Archiepiscopal Archives in Ljubljana. The manuscripts show numerous facial drawings affixed to some of the letters. This article addresses how to interpret such drawings and stresses that they do not necessarily function as symbolic images or images with any specific didactic value. Quite the opposite, these drawings seem not to have any meaning and are oft en merely indications of an illuminator’s sense of humor. Because of their exaggerated facial expressions, these drawings could be perceived as the true predecessors of modern caricature.

Z margin srednjeveških rokopisov

Shortly after the mid-thirteenth century, various images began to fill the margins in both religious and secular texts. Many factors influenced the emergence of this type of manuscript decoration, but it has generally been attributed to the revived interest in nature and the Gothic inclination for humorous and anecdotic detail. After highlighting other possible reasons for the occurrence of marginal illumination, this paper introduces two manuscripts from the Archiepiscopal Archives in Ljubljana. The manuscripts show numerous facial drawings affixed to some of the letters. This article addresses how to interpret such drawings and stresses that they do not necessarily function as symbolic images or images with any specific didactic value. Quite the opposite, these drawings seem not to have any meaning and are oft en merely indications of an illuminator’s sense of humor. Because of their exaggerated facial expressions, these drawings could be perceived as the true predecessors of modern caricature.

Color picture drawings without form and eye movements: A case report of visual form agnosia in a girl

The case of an 8-year-old girl who manifested cortical blindness and whose color drawings of faces and objects were without outlines is reported. Her birth was uneventful. When she was 10 months old, she fell down to the floor from a chair, resulting in a subarachnoidal hemorrhage. A repeat brain MRI revealed localized lesions in the visual cortices in the right and left hemispheres. As she grew older she was found to have visual imperceptions. She was found to have difficulties in learning visually the names of objects with form and letters, and in recognizing faces of her family. However, she was able to discriminate well the colors of faces and objects and learn easily the names of the objects with form by touching. She seemed to utilize subcortical vision for seeing colors of faces and objects.

Bear with Me (review)

Reviewed by: Bear with Me Deborah Stevenson, Editor Kornell, Max. Bear with Me; written and illus. by Max Kornell. Putnam, 2011. [32p]. ISBN 978-0-399-25257-0 $15.99 Reviewed from galleys R 5–8 yrs. “I thought the family was already complete,” complains Owen, who’s dismayed when his parents bring home a bear, Gary, to round out the family. Like any former only child, Owen’s annoyed with having to share and peeved that his parents are spending so much time with the newcomer (who keeps Owen awake at night with his snoring); eventually, though, Owen begins to realize that the new family member offers his own special contributions, too. Though the dethronement story is a pretty familiar one, Kornell brings a wry, at times epigrammatic style to Owen’s narration, and he’s clearly inviting his audience to share in the joke of the ursine twist on the usual family-addition story (“They said they always wanted a bear”). Mixed-media art has the soft familiarity of watercolors with a crisp and comedic immediacy conferred by a cartoonish vigor in outlining and facial drawing and by collaged layering of the cut-out figures against the backdrops. Gary in particular is a big, appealingly goofy presence, far more desirable than the squalling new baby he’s standing in for. Kids will argue that they’d rather have a bear than a baby sib anytime, but they’ll gigglingly take the point. Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Performance-driven animation of hand-drawn cartoon faces

We present a novel performance-driven approach to animating cartoon faces starting from pure 2D drawings. A 3D approximate facial model automatically built from front and side view master frames of character drawings is introduced to enable the animated cartoon faces to be viewed from angles different from that in the input video. The expressive mappings are built by artificial neural network (ANN) trained from the examples of the real face in the video and the cartoon facial drawings in the facial expression graph for a specific character. The learned mapping model makes the resultant facial animation to properly get the desired expressiveness, instead of a mere reproduction of the facial actions in the input video sequence. Furthermore, the lit sphere, capturing the lighting in the painting artwork of faces, is utilized to color the cartoon faces in terms of the 3D approximate facial model, reinforcing the hand-drawn appearance of the resulting facial animation. We made a series of comparative experiments to test the effectiveness of our method by recreating the facial expression in the commercial animation. The comparison results clearly demonstrate the superiority of our method not only in generating high quality cartoon-style facial expressions, but also in speeding up the animation production of cartoon faces. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.