Familiarity-detection from different facial feature-types: is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?
Date
2023
Authors
Carlaw, Brooke N., author
Cleary, Anne, advisor
Rhodes, Matthew, committee member
Thomas, Michael, committee member
Blanchard, Nathaniel, committee member
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Abstract
Prior research indicates that perceived familiarity with a cue during cued recall failure can be systematically increased based on the amount of feature overlap between that cue and studied items in memory (Huebert et al., 2022; McNeely-White et al., 2021, Ryals & Cleary, 2012). However, these studies used word or musical stimuli. Faces represent a special class of stimuli, as evidence suggests that unlike other types of stimuli (such as word or musical stimuli), faces may be primarily processed in a holistic fashion. A recent study demonstrated that even when a person's identity was prevented by the presence of a facial occlusion like a surgical mask or sunglasses, familiarity-detection with the occluded face could still occur, suggesting that holistic processing was not a requirement for facial familiarity-detection (Carlaw et al., 2022). However, some researchers have suggested that although faces can be decomposed into component parts when partially occluded, when faces are presented unoccluded in their entirety, the holistic face processing system may then be obligatory (Manley et al., 2019). The present study suggests that this is not the case. Isolating specific feature types at encoding through partial occlusion of faces at study (via a surgical mask or sunglasses), then embedding those familiarized feature sets in otherwise novel whole faces at test, systematically and combinedly increased the perceived familiarity of the otherwise novel whole faces. These results suggest that even whole faces are processed as sets of component parts.
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Subject
facial features
face processing
familiarity-detection