Face Recognition In Adults Research Articles

Weaker face recognition in adults with autism arises from perceptually based alterations

Weaker face recognition in adults with autism arises from perceptually based alterations

Effect of low luminance on face recognition in adults with central and peripheral vision loss.

To investigate the effect of low luminance on face recognition, specifically facial identity discrimination (FID) and facial expression recognition (FER), in adults with central vision loss (CVL) and peripheral vision loss (PVL) and to explore the association between clinical vision measures and low luminance FID and FER. Participants included 33 adults with CVL, 17 with PVL and 20 controls. FID and FER were assessed under photopic and low luminance conditions. For the FID task, 12 sets of three faces with neutral expressions were presented and participants asked to indicate the odd-face-out. For FER, 12 single faces were presented and participants asked to name the expression (neutral, happy or angry). Photopic and low luminance visual acuity (VA) and contrast sensitivity (CS) were recorded for all participants and for the PVL group, Humphrey Field Analyzer (HFA) 24-2 mean deviation (MD). FID accuracy in CVL, and to a lesser extent PVL, was reduced under low compared with photopic luminance (mean reduction 20% and 8% respectively; p < 0.001). FER accuracy was reduced only in CVL (mean reduction 25%; p < 0.001). For both CVL and PVL, low luminance and photopic VA and CS were moderately to strongly correlated with low luminance FID (ρ = 0.61-0.77, p < 0.05). For PVL, better eye HFA 24-2 MD was moderately correlated with low luminance FID (ρ = 0.54, p = 0.02). Results were similar for low luminance FER. Together, photopic VA and CS explained 75% of the variance in low luminance FID, and photopic VA explained 61% of the variance in low luminance FER. Low luminance vision measures explained little additional variance. Low luminance significantly reduced face recognition, particularly for adults with CVL. Worse VA and CS were associated with reduced face recognition. Clinically, photopic VA is a good predictor of face recognition under low luminance conditions.

Weaker face recognition in adults with autism arises from perceptually based alterations.

Face recognition has been shown to be impaired in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, it is still debated whether these face processing deficits arise from perceptually based alterations. We tested individuals with ASD and matched typically developing (TD) individuals using a delayed estimation task in which a single target face was shown either upright or inverted. Participants selected a face that best resembled the target face out of a cyclic space of morphed faces. To enable the disentanglement of visual from mnemonic processing, reports were required either following a 1 and 6second retention interval, or simultaneously while the target face was still visible. Individuals with ASD made significantly more errors than TD individuals in both the simultaneous and delayed intervals, indicating that face recognition deficits in autism are also perceptual rather than strictly memory based. Moreover, individuals with ASD exhibited weaker inversion effects than the TD individuals, on all retention intervals. This finding, that was mostly evident in precision errors, suggests that contrary to the more precise representations of upright faces in TD individuals, individuals with ASD exhibit similar levels of precision for inverted and upright faces, for both simultaneous and delayed conditions. These results suggest that weakened memory for faces reported in ASD may be secondary to an underlying perceptual deficit in face processing.

Modulation of mood on eye movement and face recognition performance.

In face recognition, looking at the eyes has been associated with engagement of local attention, as well as better recognition performance. As recent research has suggested negative mood facilitates local attention while positive mood facilitates global attention, negative mood changes may lead to more eyes-focused eye movement patterns and consequently enhance recognition performance. Here we test this hypothesis using mood induction. Through eye movement analysis with hidden Markov models, we discovered eyes-focused and nose-focused eye movement strategies in the participants, and the eyes-focused strategy was associated with better recognition performance. During the recognition phase, participants with a negative mood change had increased eye movement pattern similarity to the eyes-focused strategy, and participants' mood change was correlated with eye movement pattern similarity change. Nevertheless, mood change did not significantly change participants' eye movement strategy classification despite changes in eye movement pattern similarity, and the eye movement pattern similarity change did not modulate recognition performance. These results suggest that mood changes through mood induction lead to slight changes in eye movement pattern that may not be sufficient to modulate recognition performance. Thus, individuals may have preferred eye movement strategies in face recognition impervious to transitory mood changes. This finding is consistent with a recent speculation on limited plasticity in adult face recognition and suggests that eye movements in face recognition may provide reliable information about an individual's cognitive abilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Do portrait artists have enhanced face processing abilities? Evidence from hidden Markov modeling of eye movements

Recent research has suggested the importance of part-based information in face recognition in addition to global, whole-face information. Nevertheless, face drawing experience was reported to enhance selective attention to the eyes but did not improve face recognition performance, leading to speculations about limited plasticity in adult face recognition. Here we examined the mechanism underlying the limited advantage of face drawing experience in face recognition through the Eye Movement analysis with Hidden Markov Models (EMHMM) approach. We found that portrait artists showed more eyes-focused eye movement patterns and outperformed novices in face matching, and participants' drawing rating was correlated with both eye movement pattern and performance. In contrast, portrait artists did not outperform novices and did not differ from novices in eye movement pattern in either the face recognition or part-whole tasks, although the eyes-focused pattern was associated with better recognition performance and longer response times in the whole condition relative to the part condition. Interestingly, in contrast to the face recognition and part-whole tasks, participants' performance in face matching was predicted by their drawing rating but not eye movement pattern. These results suggested that artists' advantage in face processing is specific to tasks similar to their drawing experience such as face matching, and may be related to their better ability in extracting identity-invariant information between two faces rather than more eyes-focused eye movement patterns.

Birthweight predicts individual differences in adult face recognition ability.

It has long been known that premature birth and/or low birthweight can lead to general difficulties in cognitive and emotional functioning throughout childhood. However, the influence of these factors on more specific processes has seldom been addressed, despite their potential to account for wide individual differences in performance that often appear innate. Here, we examined the influence of gestation and birthweight on adults' face perception and face memory skills. Performance on both sub-processes was predicted by birthweight and birthweight-for-gestation, but not gestation alone. Evidence was also found for the domain-specificity of these effects: No perinatal measure correlated with performance on object perception or memory tasks, but they were related to the size of the face inversion effect on the perceptual test. This evidence indicates a novel, very early influence on individual differences in face recognition ability, which persists into adulthood, influences face-processing strategy itself, and may be domain-specific.

Neural Sensitivity to Mutual Information in Intermediate-Complexity Face Features Changes during Childhood.

One way in which face recognition develops during infancy and childhood is with regard to the visual information that contributes most to recognition judgments. Adult face recognition depends on critical features spanning a hierarchy of complexity, including low-level, intermediate, and high-level visual information. To date, the development of adult-like information biases for face recognition has focused on low-level features, which are computationally well-defined but low in complexity, and high-level features, which are high in complexity, but not defined precisely. To complement this existing literature, we examined the development of children’s neural responses to intermediate-level face features characterized using mutual information. Specifically, we examined children’s and adults’ sensitivity to varying levels of category diagnosticity at the P100 and N170 components. We found that during middle childhood, sensitivity to mutual information shifts from early components to later ones, which may indicate a critical restructuring of face recognition mechanisms that takes place over several years. This approach provides a useful bridge between the study of low- and high-level visual features for face recognition and suggests many intriguing questions for further investigation.

Is there a Bias to Encode Peer Faces in the FFA?

Our work indicates that emerging adults, individuals ages 18-25 years, have a peer bias in their face recognition abilities (Picci & Scherf, 2016). Specifically, they exhibit superior recognition for peer faces compared to faces from other developmental groups. Little is known about how the underlying neural circuitry is organized to support this peer bias. Here, we examined neural activation in emerging adults as they viewed faces from a wide range of developmental groups while they were scanned with fMRI. The face categories included children, early puberty adolescent, late puberty adolescent, emerging adult (i.e, peer), and parent faces. For each participant, we individually defined FFA regions of interest (ROI) bilaterally using each face category contrasted with objects (e.g., child faces – objects, emerging adult faces – objects). We quantified each ROI in terms of the magnitude of response to each category of faces, the number of active voxels, and the locus of activation. We found that the right FFA activation was largest in volume when defined by emerging adult faces than by any other face category. In addition, the emerging adult right FFA region was in a more anterior location compared to the other face defined FFA ROIs, particularly in comparison to the child-face defined FFA. Finally, each of the face category defined FFA ROIs exhibited a unique profile of activation, which suggest that the bilateral fusiform gyri appear to encode information about the developmental stage of a face in separate, but overlapping, patches of tissue. In sum, the findings suggest that the peer bias in emerging adult face recognition behavior may be subserved by disproportionally larger activation of neural tissue located in an anterior part of the FFA (but not FFA2) compared to that elicited by other kinds of faces. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018

Cognitive and neural markers of super-recognisers’ face processing superiority and enhanced cross-age effect

Super-recognisers inhabit the extreme high end of an adult face processing ability spectrum in the population. While almost all research in this area has evaluated those with poor or mid-range abilities, evaluating whether super-recognisers’ superiority generates distinct electrophysiological brain activity, and transcends to different age group faces (i.e., children's) is important for enhancing theoretical understanding of normal and impaired face processing. It may also be crucial for policing, as super-recognisers may be deployed to operations involving child identification and protection. In Experiment 1, super-recognisers (n = 315) outperformed controls (n = 499) at adult and infant face recognition, while also displaying larger cross-age effects. These findings were replicated in Experiment 2 (super-recognisers, n = 19; controls, n = 28), although one SR with frequent infant exposure showed no cross-age effect. Compared to controls, super-recognisers also generated significantly greater electrophysiological activity in event-related potentials associated with pictorial processing (P1) and explicit recognition (P600). Experiment 3, employing an upright and inverted sequential matching design found super-recognisers (n = 24) outperformed controls (n = 20) at adult and infant face matching, but showed no upright cross-age matching effects. Instead, they displayed larger inversion effects, and cross-age inversion effects, implicating the role of holistic processing in their perceptual superiority. Larger cross-age effects in recognition, but not matching suggests that super-recognisers’ adult face recognition is partly driven by experience. However, their enhanced infant face recognition suggest super-recognisers’ superiority is also experience-independent, results that have implications for policing and for models of face recognition.

Orientation biases for facial emotion recognition in early childhood and adulthood

Face recognition in adults relies on information in specific spatial frequency and orientation subbands. Depending on the task, adults will perform better or worse based on what information is present in face images. An example of such an information bias is adults’ reliance on horizontal orientation energy for recognition; adults are generally able to recognize a face when horizontal information is retained and have substantial difficulty identifying a face when primarily vertical information is presented. While several recent studies have demonstrated various ways that horizontal orientation energy contributes to adult face processing, there have been as yet no studies describing how this bias emerges developmentally. Currently, we recruited participants between the ages of 5 and 6-years-old (N=16) to perform a simple emotion categorization task using face images with either primarily horizontal orientation energy, primarily vertical orientation energy, or both orientation subbands. A group of adults (N=18) were also run through the same task to determine the extent to which horizontal and vertical orientation energy contributed to recognition as a function of age. Specifically, we wished to determine if an adult-like bias for horizontal orientation energy is present early in childhood, or if this bias develops over the course of middle childhood. Our results demonstrated that both groups exhibited a horizontal orientation energy bias, though this bias differed as a function of age. Both groups were better able to classify facial emotion when horizontal features were retained than when only vertical features were available. However, children performed at chance when presented with vertically-filtered images, apparently unable to use sub-optimal features for emotion recognition. By comparison, adults’ performance was worse for vertically-filtered images, but still well above chance levels. We therefore propose that one feature of visual development may be the capability to use sub-optimal or weakly diagnostic information to support recognition. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015

A face detection bias for horizontal orientations develops in middle childhood.

Faces are complex stimuli that can be described via intuitive facial features like the eyes, nose, and mouth, “configural” features like the distances between facial landmarks, and features that correspond to computations performed in the early visual system (e.g., oriented edges). With regard to this latter category of descriptors, adult face recognition relies disproportionately on information in specific spatial frequency and orientation bands: many recognition tasks are performed more accurately when adults have access to mid-range spatial frequencies (8–16 cycles/face) and horizontal orientations (Dakin and Watt, 2009). In the current study, we examined how this information bias develops in middle childhood. We recruited children between the ages of 5–10 years-old to participate in a simple categorization task that required them to label images according to whether they depicted a face or a house. Critically, children were presented with face and house images comprised either of primarily horizontal orientation energy, primarily vertical orientation energy, or both horizontal and vertical orientation energy. We predicted that any bias favoring horizontal information over vertical should be more evident in faces than in houses, and also that older children would be more likely to show such a bias than younger children. We designed our categorization task to be sufficiently easy that children would perform at near-ceiling accuracy levels, but with variation in response times that would reflect how they rely on different orientations as a function of age and object category. We found that horizontal bias for face detection (but not house detection) correlated significantly with age, suggesting an emergent category-specific bias for horizontal orientation energy that develops during middle childhood. These results thus suggest that the tuning of high-level recognition to specific low-level visual features takes place over several years of visual development.

The effect of inversion on face recognition in adults with autism spectrum disorder.

Face identity recognition has widely been shown to be impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In this study we examined the influence of inversion on face recognition in 26 adults with ASD and 33 age and IQ matched controls. Participants completed a recognition test comprising upright and inverted faces. Participants with ASD performed worse than controls on the recognition task but did not show an advantage for inverted face recognition. Both groups directed more visual attention to the eye than the mouth region and gaze patterns were not found to be associated with recognition performance. These results provide evidence of a normal effect of inversion on face recognition in adults with ASD.

Reduced Reliance on Optimal Facial Information for Identity Recognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Previous research into face processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has revealed atypical biases toward particular facial information during identity recognition. Specifically, a focus on features (or high spatial frequencies [HSFs]) has been reported for both face and nonface processing in ASD. The current study investigated the development of spatial frequency biases in face recognition in children and adolescents with and without ASD, using nonverbal mental age to assess changes in biases over developmental time. Using this measure, the control group showed a gradual specialization over time toward middle spatial frequencies (MSFs), which are thought to provide the optimal information for face recognition in adults. By contrast, individuals with ASD did not show a bias to one spatial frequency band at any stage of development. These data suggest that the “midband bias” emerges through increasing face-specific experience and that atypical face recognition performance may be related to reduced specialization toward optimal spatial frequencies in ASD.

Face recognition for newborns

Mixing, abduction and illegal adoption of newborns is a global problem and the research done to solve this problem is minimal. Traditional methods of biometric and non-biometric techniques have their own limitations and fail to provide enough level of security for newborns. The work on adult face recognition has been an active research area in recent years and automatic face recognition for newborns is least reported in the literature. Therefore it is imperative to initiate research, so that future face recognition algorithms will be able to solve this important problem for identification of newborns. The contributions of this research are (i) proposed method, which mitigates the effect of the covariates of newborn face; (ii) providing an analytical and experimental underpinning effect of different facial expressions exhibited by newborns; (iii) preparing newborn face database of 280 individuals with slight variations in pose, illumination and expression. The accuracy of the proposed matching algorithms on the newborn face database with neutral expression is 87.04% and this negates the notion that all newborns look alike.

Age-related differences in brain electrical activity during extended continuous face recognition in younger children, older children and adults

To examine the development of recognition memory in primary-school children, 36 healthy younger children (8-9 years old) and 36 healthy older children (11-12 years old) participated in an ERP study with an extended continuous face recognition task (Study 1). Each face of a series of 30 faces was shown randomly six times interspersed with distracter faces. The children were required to make old vs. new decisions. Older children responded faster than younger children, but younger children exhibited a steeper decrease in latencies across the five repetitions. Older children exhibited better accuracy for new faces, but there were no age differences in recognition accuracy for repeated faces. For the N2, N400 and late positive complex (LPC), we analyzed the old/new effects (repetition 1 vs. new presentation) and the extended repetition effects (repetitions 1 through 5). Compared to older children, younger children exhibited larger frontocentral N2 and N400 old/new effects. For extended face repetitions, negativity of the N2 and N400 decreased in a linear fashion in both age groups. For the LPC, an ERP component thought to reflect recollection, no significant old/new or extended repetition effects were found. Employing the same face recognition paradigm in 20 adults (Study 2), we found a significant N400 old/new effect at lateral frontal sites and a significant LPC repetition effect at parietal sites, with LPC amplitudes increasing linearly with the number of repetitions. This study clearly demonstrates differential developmental courses for the N400 and LPC pertaining to recognition memory for faces. It is concluded that face recognition in children is mediated by early and probably more automatic than conscious recognition processes. In adults, the LPC extended repetition effect indicates that adult face recognition memory is related to a conscious and graded recollection process rather than to an automatic recognition process.

The development of spatial frequency biases in face recognition

Previous research has suggested that a mid-band of spatial frequencies is critical to face recognition in adults, but few studies have explored the development of this bias in children. We present a paradigm adapted from the adult literature to test spatial frequency biases throughout development. Faces were presented on a screen with particular spatial frequencies blocked out by noise masks. A mid-band bias was found in adults and 9- and 10-year-olds for upright faces but not for inverted faces, suggesting a face-sensitive effect. However, 7- and 8-year-olds did not demonstrate the mid-band bias for upright faces but rather processed upright and inverted faces similarly. This suggests that specialization toward the mid-band for upright face recognition develops gradually during childhood and may relate to an advanced level of face expertise.

Face recognition in adults and children: MEG localization of frontal sources

Face recognition in adults and children: MEG localization of frontal sources

The Development of Differential Use of Inner and Outer Face Features in Familiar Face Identification

Adults recognize familiar faces better from their internal than external parts (Ellis, Shepherd, & Davies, 1979). Children from 4 to 10 years old made familiarity judgments of part-face and whole-face photographs of their schoolmates. In contrast with results reported for adult judgments of familiarity, external face features were more accurate than internal features for younger children, with a switch to the adult pattern after 9 years of age. All children showed an advantage for whole-over part-face identification. The switch in sensitivity in later childhood coincides with the period at which expertise in face recognition is believed to be achieved. This coincidence suggests some underpinnings for the basis of the development of such expertise in face recognition in adults.

Are faces perceived as configurations more by adults than by children?

Abstract Adult face recognition is severely hampered by stimulus inversion. Several investigators have attributed this vulnerability to the effect of orientation on encoding relational aspects of faces. Previous work has also demonstrated that children are less sensitive to orientation of faces than are adults. This has been interpreted as reflecting an increasing reliance on configural aspects of faces with increasing age and expertise. Young, Hellawell, and Hay (1987) demonstrated that for adults the encoding of relations among facial parts is, indeed, sensitive to orientation. When chimeric faces are upright, the top half of one face fuses with the bottom half of the other, making the person depicted in the top half difficult to recognize. This effect (the composite effect) is not seen when the faces are inverted. The present study obtained the composite effect for 6-year-old and 10-year-old children, just as for adults. The composite effect was found to an equal degree at all ages tested and was seen ...