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The automaticity of face perception is influenced by familiarity

In this study, we explore the automaticity of encoding for different facial characteristics and ask whether it is influenced by face familiarity. We used a matching task in which participants had to report whether the gender, identity, race, or expression of two briefly presented faces was the same...

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Autores principales: Yan, Xiaoqian, Young, Andrew W., Andrews, Timothy J.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5603678/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28681181
http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13414-017-1362-1
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author Yan, Xiaoqian
Young, Andrew W.
Andrews, Timothy J.
author_facet Yan, Xiaoqian
Young, Andrew W.
Andrews, Timothy J.
author_sort Yan, Xiaoqian
collection PubMed
description In this study, we explore the automaticity of encoding for different facial characteristics and ask whether it is influenced by face familiarity. We used a matching task in which participants had to report whether the gender, identity, race, or expression of two briefly presented faces was the same or different. The task was made challenging by allowing nonrelevant dimensions to vary across trials. To test for automaticity, we compared performance on trials in which the task instruction was given at the beginning of the trial, with trials in which the task instruction was given at the end of the trial. As a strong criterion for automatic processing, we reasoned that if perception of a given characteristic (gender, race, identity, or emotion) is fully automatic, the timing of the instruction should not influence performance. We compared automaticity for the perception of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Performance with unfamiliar faces was higher for all tasks when the instruction was given at the beginning of the trial. However, we found a significant interaction between instruction and task with familiar faces. Accuracy of gender and identity judgments to familiar faces was the same regardless of whether the instruction was given before or after the trial, suggesting automatic processing of these properties. In contrast, there was an effect of instruction for judgments of expression and race to familiar faces. These results show that familiarity enhances the automatic processing of some types of facial information more than others.
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spelling pubmed-56036782017-10-04 The automaticity of face perception is influenced by familiarity Yan, Xiaoqian Young, Andrew W. Andrews, Timothy J. Atten Percept Psychophys Article In this study, we explore the automaticity of encoding for different facial characteristics and ask whether it is influenced by face familiarity. We used a matching task in which participants had to report whether the gender, identity, race, or expression of two briefly presented faces was the same or different. The task was made challenging by allowing nonrelevant dimensions to vary across trials. To test for automaticity, we compared performance on trials in which the task instruction was given at the beginning of the trial, with trials in which the task instruction was given at the end of the trial. As a strong criterion for automatic processing, we reasoned that if perception of a given characteristic (gender, race, identity, or emotion) is fully automatic, the timing of the instruction should not influence performance. We compared automaticity for the perception of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Performance with unfamiliar faces was higher for all tasks when the instruction was given at the beginning of the trial. However, we found a significant interaction between instruction and task with familiar faces. Accuracy of gender and identity judgments to familiar faces was the same regardless of whether the instruction was given before or after the trial, suggesting automatic processing of these properties. In contrast, there was an effect of instruction for judgments of expression and race to familiar faces. These results show that familiarity enhances the automatic processing of some types of facial information more than others. Springer US 2017-07-05 2017 /pmc/articles/PMC5603678/ /pubmed/28681181 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13414-017-1362-1 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Article
Yan, Xiaoqian
Young, Andrew W.
Andrews, Timothy J.
The automaticity of face perception is influenced by familiarity
title The automaticity of face perception is influenced by familiarity
title_full The automaticity of face perception is influenced by familiarity
title_fullStr The automaticity of face perception is influenced by familiarity
title_full_unstemmed The automaticity of face perception is influenced by familiarity
title_short The automaticity of face perception is influenced by familiarity
title_sort automaticity of face perception is influenced by familiarity
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5603678/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28681181
http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13414-017-1362-1
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