While the dissociation between invariant aspects of a face and emotional expressions has been studied extensively, the role of non-emotional changeable aspects in face recognition has been considered in the literature rarely. The purpose of the present study was to understand whether information on changeable aspects (with and without emotional content) can help those individuals with poor face recognition abilities (when based on invariant features) in recognizing famous faces. From a population of 80 university students we selected two groups of participants, one with poor performance (experimental group, EG) and the other with good performance (control group, CG). By means of a preliminary experiment, we selected videos of 16 Italian celebrities that were presented in three different conditions: motionless, with non-emotional expressions, and with emotional expressions. While the CG did not differ in the three conditions, the EG showed a significantly better performance in the two conditions with facial movements, which did not differ between each other. These results suggest a role of changeable aspects in the identification of famous faces, rising only in the case invariant features are not analyzed properly.

Albonico, A., Malaspina, M., Daini, R. (2015). Something in the way people move: The benefit of facial movements in face identification. FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY, 6, 1-8 [10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01211].

Something in the way people move: The benefit of facial movements in face identification

MALASPINA, MANUELA
Secondo
;
DAINI, ROBERTA
Ultimo
2015

Abstract

While the dissociation between invariant aspects of a face and emotional expressions has been studied extensively, the role of non-emotional changeable aspects in face recognition has been considered in the literature rarely. The purpose of the present study was to understand whether information on changeable aspects (with and without emotional content) can help those individuals with poor face recognition abilities (when based on invariant features) in recognizing famous faces. From a population of 80 university students we selected two groups of participants, one with poor performance (experimental group, EG) and the other with good performance (control group, CG). By means of a preliminary experiment, we selected videos of 16 Italian celebrities that were presented in three different conditions: motionless, with non-emotional expressions, and with emotional expressions. While the CG did not differ in the three conditions, the EG showed a significantly better performance in the two conditions with facial movements, which did not differ between each other. These results suggest a role of changeable aspects in the identification of famous faces, rising only in the case invariant features are not analyzed properly.
Articolo in rivista - Articolo scientifico
ace perception, famous face identification, emotional expressions, typical facial expressions
English
2015
6
1
8
1211
open
Albonico, A., Malaspina, M., Daini, R. (2015). Something in the way people move: The benefit of facial movements in face identification. FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY, 6, 1-8 [10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01211].
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10281/86530
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