Contextual Modulation of Biases in Face Recognition

BACKGROUND: The ability to recognize the faces of potential cooperators and cheaters is fundamental to social exchanges, given that cooperation for mutual benefit is expected. Studies addressing biases in face recognition have so far proved inconclusive, with reports of biases towards faces of cheaters, biases towards faces of cooperators, or no biases at all. This study attempts to uncover possible causes underlying such discrepancies. METHODOLOGY AND FINDINGS: Four experiments were designed to investigate biases in face recognition during social exchanges when behavioral descriptors (prosocial, antisocial or neutral) embedded in different scenarios were tagged to faces during memorization. Face recognition, measured as accuracy and response latency, was tested with modified yes-no, forced-choice and recall tasks (N = 174). An enhanced recognition of faces tagged with prosocial descriptors was observed when the encoding scenario involved financial transactions and the rules of the social contract were not explicit (experiments 1 and 2). Such bias was eliminated or attenuated by making participants explicitly aware of "cooperative", "cheating" and "neutral/indifferent" behaviors via a pre-test questionnaire and then adding such tags to behavioral descriptors (experiment 3). Further, in a social judgment scenario with descriptors of salient moral behaviors, recognition of antisocial and prosocial faces was similar, but significantly better than neutral faces (experiment 4). CONCLUSION: The results highlight the relevance of descriptors and scenarios of social exchange in face recognition, when the frequency of prosocial and antisocial individuals in a group is similar. Recognition biases towards prosocial faces emerged when descriptors did not state the rules of a social contract or the moral status of a behavior, and they point to the existence of broad and flexible cognitive abilities finely tuned to minor changes in social context

Fatima Maria Felisberti's Quick Files

The Quick Files feature was discontinued and it’s files were migrated into this Project on March 11, 2022. The file URL’s will still resolve properly, and the Quick Files logs are available in the Project’s Recent Activity

The effect of aging, encoding order, and race in contextual face recognition

The ability to recognize faces of cooperators and cheaters is essential to social exchanges. This study investigated the effect of age, encoding order, and race in the recognition of groups of faces tagged with different reputations (trustworthy, untrustworthy or neutral) using an "old/new" recognition task. The encoding duration for each group of four faces was brief (6s). Participants showed lower hit rates and longer reaction time for untrustworthy than trustworthy and neutral faces (all Caucasian faces), but no primacy or recency effects. The second experiment showed that young (18-29 years old) and intermediate-age adults (30-59 years old) had lower hit rates for untrustworthy faces than trustworthy ones, whereas seniors ([less than or equal to] 60 years old) were equally sensitive to all faces. As expected, RT and false alarm rates increased with age. In the third experiment half of the faces to be memorized were Caucasian and half were African (avatars generated with FaceGen software). Participants (34 Caucasian, 36 Afro-Caribbean) recognized the Caucasian faces significantly more accurately than African ones, and trustworthy faces better than untrustworthy ones. Participants tended to recognize faces of their own race better than the other race. Untrustworthy faces of the same race of the participants were better recognized than the other race. The findings suggest that face recognition is not solely based on a stereotypical evolutionary response. but rather on flexible cognitive processes that are sensitive to aging and race, and finely tuned to the changes in the context in which faces were encoded

Visual asymmetries during face encoding Increased dwell time and fixations in the upper and left hemifields

Visual field asymmetries (VFA) in the encoding of groups rather than individual faces has been rarely investigated. Here, eye movements (dwell time (DT) and fixations (Fix)) were recorded during the encoding of three groups of four faces tagged with cheating, cooperative, or neutral behaviours. Faces in each of the three groups were placed in the upper left (UL), upper right (UR), lower left (LL), or lower right (LR) quadrants. Face recognition was equally high in the three groups. In contrast, the proportion of DT and Fix were higher for faces in the left than the right hemifield and in the upper rather than the lower hemifield. The overall time spent looking at the UL was higher than in the other quadrants. The findings are relevant to the understanding of VFA in face processing, especially groups of faces, and might be linked to environmental cues and/or reading habits

The interplay between cognitive load and driving in scenarios of daily commuting

Data from two studies about the effect of cognitive load on driving performance (Study 1) and the effect of demanging driving on cognitive performance (Study 2). Study 2 also contains data from the Letter 'e' recognition test

Long-lasting effects of early family environment on adults processing of brief affective facial expressions

This study investigated whether early family-related environmental factors (FrF) can still affect the adults’ ability to recognize very brief facial expressions of emotion. The accuracy and RT to the decoding of microexpressions of anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness was measured in a repeated-measures 6-AFC paradigm. Five experiments revealed that up to 13% of the variance in responses could be predicted by early FrF such as attachment orientation, number of siblings, and parental authority style. The effect sizes were modest to moderate. The adults’ accuracy for fear and anger was inversely correlated with the number of siblings, whereas the accuracy for contempt was positively correlated with an avoidant attachment or with recalled permissive and authoritative fathers. The RT for fear tended to be faster in adults with a fearful attachment, and faster for anger in those with permissive fathers. The findings point to long-lasting FrF effects on affective processing and suggest a role for FrF in the fine tuning of adults’ responses to signs of contextual hostility or threat when the time available for evaluation is severely restricted