Topic
Face processing research, explained
25 open-access face processing studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Do surgical masks make it harder to tell if two faces match?
Putting a surgical mask on one or both faces made people much worse at judging whether two photos showed the same person, for famous and unfamiliar faces alike.
- Do people from different cultures look at faces differently?
Western and East Asian observers recognised faces equally well but gathered the information differently: Westerners fixated the eyes and mouth, while East Asians fixated the centre of the face and used more peripheral vision.
- Do face masks make it harder for children to recognise faces?
Masks cut children's ability to recognise newly learned faces by about a fifth and made them process faces less as a whole, an effect somewhat larger than in adults on a difficulty-matched test.
- Is being good with faces one ability or several?
People who were good at matching unfamiliar faces also tended to be good at learning new faces and recognising famous ones as children, but this shared face ability explained only about a quarter of the differences between people.
- How to accurately spot 'super-recognizers' of faces
Many people who excel at memorizing faces are not actually superior at matching unfamiliar faces or spotting them in crowds, meaning standard single-test screenings are insufficient.
- How fast can we recognise a famous face?
Even under extreme time pressure, people need at least about 360-390 milliseconds to recognise a famous face among unfamiliar ones, much longer than simply detecting a face.
- How quickly can we recognize a famous face?
Even when pushed to respond as fast as possible, people needed roughly 180 extra milliseconds to tell a famous face from an unknown one compared with simply detecting that a human face was there.
- How do face masks affect remembering faces, and can gaze help?
Masks made unfamiliar faces harder to remember in every combination tested, most of all when a face was seen masked at one time and unmasked at the other, and people who adapted where they looked were less affected.
- Do masks hurt face recognition as much as sunglasses?
Masks and sunglasses made it equally harder to tell that two photos showed the same stranger, and a year of living with masks did not make people any better at it.
- What do face masks do to how we read faces?
Surgical masks made adults worse at naming celebrities, reading most emotions and judging gender, but they actually made angry faces easier to recognise.
- Why do people with schizophrenia struggle to tell faces apart?
People with schizophrenia needed more contrast to identify faces because their visual processing was noisier, not because they used facial information less efficiently.
- Can your eyes give away a face you're lying about knowing?
When students denied recognising a lecturer's face, their eyes lingered longer on it than on truly unknown faces, and this held even when they deliberately tried to look at every face the same way.
- Does being good with faces make you good at recognising people?
People who scored well on a standard face-matching test were mostly not better at matching identities from bodies or from movement, even though group statistics suggested they were.
- Does hidden racial bias change how well we remember other-race faces?
More contact with Asian people predicted better memory for Asian faces, and, unexpectedly, strong face recognisers with a more negative implicit bias toward Asians remembered Asian faces best.
- Do masks and sunglasses impair age guessing and face recognition?
Wearing face masks, but not sunglasses, makes people overestimate a stranger's age, while both disguises equally harm your ability to recognize the person later when they are undisguised.
- Can we sense familiarity in faces covered by masks or sunglasses?
People can still sense if a face is familiar even when surgical masks or sunglasses make it impossible to identify who the person is.
- How do East Asians perceive facial expressions?
East Asian participants grouped emotional expressions into three broad categories rather than the six traditional Western categories, despite a computer algorithm recognizing all six.
- Can you recognise someone you met in a mask?
Masks hurt face memory, but the damage depended on how the study and test situations were set up, and seeing the same masked face twice did not reliably help.
- How can we get better at finding a stranger on CCTV?
Finding an unfamiliar person in busy CCTV footage is very error-prone, but giving searchers several different photos of the target and using higher-resolution video both help.
- Can people tell a hyper-realistic mask from a real face?
Almost nobody noticed that a face was actually a lifelike silicone mask, whether they saw it in a photo or sitting on a bench in front of them.
- Do we still see faces 'as a whole' when they're tilted up or down?
Turning faces upside down hurt recognition for all side-turned views and for moderate up/down tilts, but not for extreme up/down tilts, suggesting holistic face processing stops working at those unusual angles.
- How does our ability to detect faces change as we grow up?
As children grow from ages 5 to 10, they develop a selective visual preference for horizontal details when identifying faces, but not when identifying houses.
- When half a face is hidden, do we imagine it as more average?
When people imagined the hidden half of a face, they consistently pictured it as more average in shape than it really was, especially for faces that looked unusual.
- How do we look at our own face compared with a stranger's?
People spent relatively more time looking at the lower half of faces they judged to be their own, and those with a sharper mental image of their own face looked more at the eye region of their own face.
- Does moving your eyes make a face preview more useful?
Seeing an upright face in the periphery sped up judgements about that face only when people actually moved their eyes to it, not when the same images simply appeared in the centre of their gaze.