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

doi:10.1006/jecp.1995.1009

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Volume 59, Issue 2, April 1995, Pages 196-210

https://doi.org/10.1006/jecp.1995.1009 Get rights and content

Abstract

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.

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Cited by (94)

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The way faces become familiar and what information is represented as familiarity develops has puzzled researchers in the field of human face recognition for decades. In this paper, we present three experiments serving as proof of concept for a cost-efficient mechanism of face learning describing how facial representations form over time and accounting for recognition errors. We propose that the encoding of facial information is dynamic and modulated by the intrinsic stability in individual faces' appearance. We drew on a robust and ecological method using a proxy of exposure to famous faces in the real world and manipulated test images to assess the prediction that recognition of famous faces is affected by their relative stability in appearance. We consistently show that stable facial appearances (like Tom Cruise's) facilitate recognition in early stages of familiarisation but that performance does not improve much over time. In contrast, variations in appearance (like Jared Leto's) hinder recognition at first but improve performance with further media exposure. This pattern of results is consistent with the proposed cost-efficient face learning mechanism whereby facial representations build on a foundation of large-scale diagnostic information and refine over time if needed. When coarse information loses its diagnostic value through the experience of variations in appearance across encounters, diagnostic facial details and/or their spatial relationships must receive more weights, leading to refined representations that are more discriminative and reliable than representations of stable faces.
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Neuropsychological studies have shown that prosopagnosic individuals perceive face structure in an atypical way. This might preclude the formation of appropriate face representations and, consequently, hamper effective recognition. The present ERP study, in combination with Bayesian source reconstruction, investigates how information related to both external (E) and internal (I) features was processed by E.C. and I.P., suffering from acquired and developmental prosopagnosia, respectively. They carried out a face-feature matching task with new faces. E.C. showed poor performance and remarkable lack of early face-sensitive P1, N170 and P2 responses on right (damaged) posterior cortex. Although she presented the expected mismatch effect to target faces in the E-I sequence, it was of shorter duration than in Controls, and involved left parietal, right frontocentral and dorsofrontal regions, suggestive of reduced neural circuitry to process face configurations. In turn, I.P. performed efficiently but with a remarkable bias to give “match” responses. His face-sensitive potentials P1–N170 were comparable to those from Controls, however, he showed no subsequent P2 response and a mismatch effect only in the I-E sequence, reflecting activation confined to those regions that sustain typically the initial stages of face processing. Relevantly, neither of the prosopagnosics exhibited conspicuous P3 responses to features acting as primes, indicating that diagnostic information for constructing face representations could not be sufficiently attended nor deeply encoded. Our findings suggest a different locus for altered neurocognitive mechanisms in the face network in participants with different types of prosopagnosia, but common indicators of a deficient allocation of attentional resources for further recognition.
A face is more than just the eyes, nose, and mouth: fMRI evidence that face-selective cortex represents external features
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Citation Excerpt :
Our results also shed light on developmental and adult psychophysical literatures investigating the role of external features in face recognition. These literatures suggest that humans use external features from infancy (Slater et al., 2000; Turati et al., 2006), and continue to do so across development, albeit with an increasing tendency to rely on internal over external features (Campbell and Tuck, 1995; Campbell et al., 1995; Want et al., 2003). Additional work in adults has shown a similar shift in the reliance on internal features as faces become more familiar (Ellis et al., 1979; O'Donnell and Bruce, 2001).
What is a face? Intuition, along with abundant behavioral and neural evidence, indicates that internal features (e.g., eyes, nose, mouth) are critical for face recognition, yet some behavioral and neural findings suggest that external features (e.g., hair, head outline, neck and shoulders) may likewise be processed as a face. Here we directly test this hypothesis by investigating how external (and internal) features are represented in the brain. Using fMRI, we found highly selective responses to external features (relative to objects and scenes) within the face processing system in particular, rivaling that observed for internal features. We then further asked how external and internal features are represented in regions of the cortical face processing system, and found a similar division of labor for both kinds of features, with the occipital face area and posterior superior temporal sulcus representing the parts of both internal and external features, and the fusiform face area representing the coherent arrangement of both internal and external features. Taken together, these results provide strong neural evidence that a “face” is composed of both internal and external features.
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2015, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
Citation Excerpt :
For instance, it has been suggested that children rely more on featural information to process faces and start to rely on configural information at the age of 10 (Carey and Diamond, 1977). Further evidence, however, challenges this theory by showing that configural processing has also been found in children aged 4–10 years old (Baenninger, 1994; Campbell et al., 1995; Pascalis et al., 2001; Taylor et al., 2004) or even earlier (Cohen and Cashon, 2001; Turati et al., 2004). Both newborns and older children seem to be capable of discriminating between similar faces (Kelly et al., 2009; Turati et al., 2008), recognizing faces that were previously learned in a different view (Kelly et al., 2009; Turati et al., 2008) and also recognizing both external and internal facial features (Turati et al., 2006).
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An adaptation study of internal and external features in facial representations
2014, Vision Research
Citation Excerpt :
This suggests that whole-face processing tends to reduce regional disparities in the contribution of local facial parts, perhaps indicating another facet of face-expert processing mechanisms. Increasing dependence on internal features may be one of the markers of acquisition of perceptual expertise with faces, with studies suggesting an emphasis on internal features becoming apparent at around aged 9 years (Campbell, Walker, & Baroncohen, 1995; Want et al., 2003), and in adults, the degree of attention and fixation on internal features is correlated with the ability to recognise faces (Fletcher, Butavicius, & Lee, 2008). Evidence for superiority of internal over external features comes from a variety of approaches.
Prior work suggests that internal features contribute more than external features to face processing. Whether this asymmetry is also true of the mental representations of faces is not known. We used face adaptation to determine whether the internal and external features of faces contribute differently to the representation of facial identity, whether this was affected by familiarity, and whether the results differed if the features were presented in isolation or as part of a whole face. In a first experiment, subjects performed a study of identity adaptation for famous and novel faces, in which the adapting stimuli were whole faces, the internal features alone, or the external features alone. In a second experiment, the same faces were used, but the adapting internal and external features were superimposed on whole faces that were ambiguous to identity. The first experiment showed larger aftereffects for unfamiliar faces, and greater aftereffects from internal than from external features, and the latter was true for both familiar and unfamiliar faces. When internal and external features were presented in a whole-face context in the second experiment, aftereffects from either internal or external features was less than that from the whole face, and did not differ from each other. While we reproduce the greater importance of internal features when presented in isolation, we find this is equally true for familiar and unfamiliar faces. The dominant influence of internal features is reduced when integrated into a whole-face context, suggesting another facet of expert face processing.
The role of inner and outer face parts in holistic processing: A developmental study
2014, Acta Psychologica
Citation Excerpt :
Furthermore, studies employing similar techniques to the current task have failed to observe feature-type asymmetries when comparing inner and outer isolated face (e.g. Want, Pascalis, Coleman, & Blades, 2003). Developmental studies however, have shown that while children under 7-years of age recognise familiar faces more accurately from outer rather than inner features, children above 7-years of age demonstrate the opposite effects thus echoing the adult results demonstrated by Young et al. (e.g. Campbell & Tuck, 1995; Campbell, Walker, & Baron-Cohen, 1995; Campbell et al., 1999). However, using a 2AFC procedure similar to the one used in the present study, Want et al. (2003) examined whole, inner, and outer unfamiliar face recognition with 5-, 7-, and 9-year old children and adults, and reported that all participants recognised outer faces faster and more accurately than inner faces.
The effects of inner–outer feature interactions with unfamiliar faces were investigated in 6- and 10-year-old children and adults (20–30 years) to determine their contribution in holistic face vision. Participants completed a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) task under two conditions. The congruent condition used whole, inner-only, and outer-only stimuli. The incongruent condition used stimuli combining the inner features from one face with outer features from a novel face, or vice versa. Results yielded strong congruency effects which were moderated by pronounced feature-type asymmetries specific to developmental stage. Adults showed an inner-feature preference during congruent trials, but no asymmetry for incongruent trials. Children showed no asymmetry for congruent trials, but an outer-feature preference for incongruent trials. These findings concur with recent theoretical developments indicating that adults and children are likely to differ in the types of feature-specific information they preferentially encode in face perception, and that holistic effects are moderated differently in adults and children as a function of feature type.

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

Abstract

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