From the Association of Psychological Science press release:<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Face recognition is an important social skill, but not all of us are equally good at it,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Beijing Normal University cognitive psychologist Jia Liu. But what accounts for the difference? A new study by Liu and colleagues Ruosi Wang, Jingguang Li, Huizhen Fang, and Moqian Tian provides the first experimental evidence that the inequality of abilities is rooted in the unique way in which the mind perceives faces. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Individuals who process faces more holistically<\/strong>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthat is, as an integrated whole\u00e2\u20ac\u201d\u00e2\u20ac\u0153are better at face recognition<\/strong>,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Liu.\u00c2\u00a0The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.<\/p>\n
In daily life, we recognize faces both holistically and also \u00e2\u20ac\u0153analytically\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthat is, picking out individual parts, such as eyes or nose<\/strong>. But while the brain uses analytical processing for all kinds of objects\u00e2\u20ac\u201dcars, houses, animals\u00e2\u20ac\u201d\u00e2\u20ac\u0153holistic processing is thought to be especially critical to face recognition<\/strong>,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Liu.<\/p>\n
To isolate holistic processing as the key to face recognition, the researchers first measured the ability of study participants\u00e2\u20ac\u201d337 male and female students\u00e2\u20ac\u201dto remember whole faces, using a task in which they had to select studied faces and flowers from among unfamiliar ones.<\/p>\n
The next two tasks measured performance in tasks that mark holistic processing. The composite-face effect (CFE) shows up when two faces are split horizontally and stuck together. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s easier to identify the top half-face when it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s misaligned with the bottom one than when the two halves are fitted smoothly together. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because our brain automatically combines them to form a new\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand unfamiliar\u00e2\u20ac\u201d\u00e2\u20ac\u0153face,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Liu: evidence of holistic processing. The other marker of holistic processing is the whole-part effect (WPE). In this one, people are shown a face, then asked to recognize a part of it\u00e2\u20ac\u201dsay, the nose. They do better when the feature is presented within the whole face than when it stands on its own among other noses: again, we remember the nose integrated into the whole face. The researchers also assessed participants\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 general intelligence.<\/p>\n
The results: Those participants who scored higher on CFE and WPE\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthat is, who did well in holistic processing\u00e2\u20ac\u201dalso performed better at the first task of recognizing faces. But there was no link between facial recognition and general intelligence, which is made up of various cognitive processes\u00e2\u20ac\u201da suggestion that face processing is unique<\/strong>.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Our findings partly explains why some never forget faces, while others misrecognize their friends and relatives frequently,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Liu. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why the research holds promise for therapies for that second category of people, who may suffer disorders such as prosopagnosia (face blindness) and autism. Knowing that the mind receives a face as one whole thing and not as a collection of individual parts, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153we may train people on holistic processing to improve their ability in recognizing faces,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Liu says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From the Association of Psychological Science press release: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Face recognition is an important social skill, but not all of us are equally good at it,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Beijing Normal University cognitive… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[42,18,363,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":218,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions\/218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}