Developmental improvement and age-related decline in unfamiliar face matching

Age-related changes have been documented widely in studies of face recognition and eyewitness identification. However, it is not clear whether these changes arise from general developmental differences in memory or occur specifically during the perceptual processing of faces. We report two experiments to track such perceptual changes using a 1-in-10 (Experiment 1) and 1-in-1 (Experiment 2) matching task for unfamiliar faces. Both experiments showed improvements in face matching during childhood and adult-like accuracy levels by adolescence. In addition, face-matching performance declined in adults of the age of 65. These findings indicate that developmental improvements and aging-related differences in face processing arise from changes in the perceptual encoding of faces. A clear face inversion effect was also present in all age groups. This indicates that those age-related changes in face matching reflect a quantitative effect, whereby typical face processes are engaged but do not operate at the best-possible level. These data suggest that part of the problem of eyewitness identification in children and elderly persons might reflect impairments in the perceptual processing of unfamiliar faces

Feature instructions improve face-matching accuracy

Identity comparisons of photographs of unfamiliar faces are prone to error but important for applied settings, such as person identification at passport control. Finding techniques to improve face-matching accuracy is therefore an important contemporary research topic. This study investigated whether matching accuracy can be improved by instruction to attend to specific facial features. Experiment 1 showed that instruction to attend to the eyebrows enhanced matching accuracy for optimized same-day same-race face pairs but not for other-race faces. By contrast, accuracy was unaffected by instruction to attend to the eyes, and declined with instruction to attend to ears. Experiment 2 replicated the eyebrow-instruction improvement with a different set of same-race faces, comprising both optimized sameday and more challenging different-day face pairs. These findings suggest that instruction to attend to specific features can enhance face-matching accuracy, but feature selection is crucial and generalization across face sets may be limited. - 2018 Megreya, Bindemann. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Scopu

Task constraints distinguish perspective inferences from perspective use during discourse interpretation in a false belief task

Interpreting other peoples’ actions relies on an understanding of their current mental states (e.g. beliefs, desires and intentions). In this paper, we distinguish between listeners’ ability to infer others’ perspectives and their explicit use of this knowledge to predict subsequent actions. In a visual-world study, two groups of participants (passive observers vs. active participants) watched short videos, depicting transfer events, where one character (‘Jane’) either held a true or false belief about an object’s location. We tracked participants’ eye-movements around the final visual scene, time-locked to related auditory descriptions (e.g. “Jane will look for the chocolates in the container on the left”.). Results showed that active participants had already inferred the character’s belief in the 1 s preview period prior to auditory onset, before it was possible to use this information to predict an outcome. Moreover, they used this inference to correctly anticipate reference to the object’s initial location on false belief trials at the earliest possible point (i.e. from “Jane” onwards). In contrast, passive observers only showed evidence of a belief inference from the onset of “Jane”, and did not show reliable use of this inference to predict Jane’s behaviour on false belief trials until much later, when the location (“left/right”) was auditorily available. These results show that active engagement in a task activates earlier inferences about others’ perspectives, and drives immediate use of this information to anticipate others’ actions, compared to passive observers, who are susceptible to influences from egocentric or reality biases. Finally, we review evidence that using other peoples’ perspectives to predict their behaviour is more cognitively effortful than simply using one’s own

Latency-Based and Psychophysiological Measures of Sexual Interest Show Convergent and Concurrent Validity.

Latency-based measures of sexual interest require additional evidence of validity, as do newer pupil dilation approaches. A total of 102 community men completed six latency-based measures of sexual interest. Pupillary responses were recorded during three of these tasks and in an additional task where no participant response was required. For adult stimuli, there was a high degree of intercorrelation between measures, suggesting that tasks may be measuring the same underlying construct (convergent validity). In addition to being correlated with one another, measures also predicted participants' self-reported sexual interest, demonstrating concurrent validity (i.e., the ability of a task to predict a more validated, simultaneously recorded, measure). Latency-based and pupillometric approaches also showed preliminary evidence of concurrent validity in predicting both self-reported interest in child molestation and viewing pornographic material containing children. Taken together, the study findings build on the evidence base for the validity of latency-based and pupillometric measures of sexual interest

Generalization across view in face memory and face matching.

While a change in view is considered to be one of the most damaging manipulations for facial identification, this phenomenon has been measured traditionally with tasks that confound perceptual processes with recognition memory. This study explored facial identification with a pairwise matching task to determine whether view generalization is possible when memory factors are minimised. Experiment 1 showed that the detrimental view effect in recognition memory is attenuated in face matching. Moreover, analysis of individual differences revealed that some observers can identify faces across view with perfect accuracy. This was replicated in Experiment 2, which also showed that view generalization is unaffected when only the internal facial features are shown. These results indicate that the view effect in recognition memory does not arise from data limits, whereby faces contain insufficient visual information to allow identification across views. Instead, these findings point to resource limits, within observers, that hamper such person identification in recognition memory

Body Language Influences on Facial Identification at Passport Control: An Exploration in Virtual Reality

Person identification at airports requires the matching of a passport photograph to its bearer. One aim of this process is to find identity impostors, who use valid identity documents of similar-looking people to avoid detection. In psychology, this process has been studied extensively with static pairs of face photographs that require identity match (same person shown) versus mismatch (two different people) decisions. However, this approach provides a limited proxy for studying how other factors, such as nonverbal behaviour, affect this task. The current study investigated the influence of body language on facial identity matching within a virtual reality airport environment, by manipulating activity levels of person avatars queueing at passport control. In a series of six experiments, detection of identity mismatches was unaffected when observers were not instructed to utilise body language. By contrast, under explicit instruction to look out for unusual body language, these cues enhanced detection of mismatches but also increased false classification of matches. This effect was driven by increased activity levels rather than body language that simply differed from the behaviour of the majority of passengers. The implications and limitations of these findings are discussed

Oculomotor Guidance and Capture by Irrelevant Faces

Even though it is generally agreed that face stimuli constitute a special class of stimuli, which are treated preferentially by our visual system, it remains unclear whether faces can capture attention in a stimulus-driven manner. Moreover, there is a long-standing debate regarding the mechanism underlying the preferential bias of selecting faces. Some claim that faces constitute a set of special low-level features to which our visual system is tuned; others claim that the visual system is capable of extracting the meaning of faces very rapidly, driving attentional selection. Those debates continue because many studies contain methodological peculiarities and manipulations that prevent a definitive conclusion. Here, we present a new visual search task in which observers had to make a saccade to a uniquely colored circle while completely irrelevant objects were also present in the visual field. The results indicate that faces capture and guide the eyes more than other animated objects and that our visual system is not only tuned to the low-level features that make up a face but also to its meaning

Attention to beds in natural scenes by observers with insomnia symptoms

Attention biases to sleep-related stimuli are held to play a key role in the development and maintenance of insomnia, but such biases have only been shown with controlled visual displays. This study investigated whether observers with insomnia symptoms allocate attention to sleep-related items in natural scenes, by recording eye movements during free-viewing of bedrooms. Participants with insomnia symptoms and normal sleepers were matched in their visual exploration of these scenes, and there was no evidence that the attention of those with insomnia symptoms was captured more quickly by sleep-related stimuli than that of normal sleepers. However, the insomnia group fixated bed regions on more trials and, once fixated on a bed, also remained there for longer. These findings indicate that sleep stimuli are particularly effective in retaining visual attention in complex natural scenes

Searching for faces differs from categorization: Evidence from scenes and eye movements

This study examined whether the detection of frontal, ¾ and profile face views differs from their categorization as faces. Experiment 1 compared three tasks that required observers to determine the presence or absence of a face but varied in the extent to which they had to search for faces in simple displays and small or large scenes to make this decision. Performance was equivalent for all face views in simple displays and small scenes, but was notably slower for profile views when this required the search for faces in extended scene displays. This search effect was confirmed in Experiment 2, which compared observers’ eye movements with their response times to faces in visual scenes. These results demonstrate that the categorization of faces at fixation is dissociable from the detection of faces in space. Consequently, we suggest that face detection should be studied with extended visual displays, such as natural scenes