A serial test of the laterality of familiar face recognition

Kampf, Michal; Nachson, Israel; Babkoff, Harvey

doi:10.1016/s0278-2626(02)00008-8

Cited by 28 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Differences between un-/familiar faces emerged from this point on, albeit more pronouncedly for relatively later fixations. Whether the observed overreliance of processing the individual facial features for familiar face stimuli can be attributed to the more bilateral nature of familiar face representations (as some studies using famous faces suggest, e.g., Kampf et al, 2002; Schweinberger et al, 2003; Baird and Burton, 2008) and thus arises due to a relative lack of left-hemisphere involvement for unfamiliar face stimuli, remains to be determined. The present findings further offer an account that can reconcile the previously reported contradicting findings outlined in the introduction.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fixation patterns during recognition of personally familiar and unfamiliar faces

et al. 2010

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Previous studies recording eye gaze during face perception have rendered somewhat inconclusive findings with respect to fixation differences between familiar and unfamiliar faces. This can be attributed to a number of factors that differ across studies: the type and extent of familiarity with the faces presented, the definition of areas of interest subject to analyses, as well as a lack of consideration for the time course of scan patterns. Here we sought to address these issues by recording fixations in a recognition task with personally familiar and unfamiliar faces. After a first common fixation on a central superior location of the face in between features, suggesting initial holistic encoding, and a subsequent left eye bias, local features were focused and explored more for familiar than unfamiliar faces. Although the number of fixations did not differ for un-/familiar faces, the locations of fixations began to differ before familiarity decisions were provided. This suggests that in the context of familiarity decisions without time constraints, differences in processing familiar and unfamiliar faces arise relatively early – immediately upon initiation of the first fixation to identity-specific information – and that the local features of familiar faces are processed more than those of unfamiliar faces.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fixation patterns during recognition of personally familiar and unfamiliar faces

et al. 2010

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“…Even if this was not explicit, this task is clearly based on top-down face recognition processes. In contrast, subjects performed in an experiment by Kampf et al (2002) a manual yes/no task on 144 famous faces presented among 244 unknown ones. Mean RT was 431 ms with an accuracy that varied between 67 and 91%.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…So what is the fastest speed at which a face can be recognized? Highly variable reaction times (RTs) have actually been reported in studies of face recognition, ranging from 400 to 900 ms (mean or median RTs, e.g., Kampf et al, 2002; Herzmann et al, 2004; Caharel et al, 2005; Anaki et al, 2007; Baird and Burton, 2008; Anaki and Bentin, 2009; Ramon et al, 2011; Barragan-Jason et al, 2012). Such variability can be accounted for by numerous factors, such as the number of stimuli (only one to hundreds), the use of repeated or trial-unique stimuli, and the nature of the stimuli (photographs or drawings).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fast and Famous: Looking for the Fastest Speed at Which a Face Can be Recognized

Barragan‐Jason¹,

Besson²,

Ceccaldi³

et al. 2013

Front. Psychol.

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Face recognition is supposed to be fast. However, the actual speed at which faces can be recognized remains unknown. To address this issue, we report two experiments run with speed constraints. In both experiments, famous faces had to be recognized among unknown ones using a large set of stimuli to prevent pre-activation of features which would speed up recognition. In the first experiment (31 participants), recognition of famous faces was investigated using a rapid go/no-go task. In the second experiment, 101 participants performed a highly time constrained recognition task using the Speed and Accuracy Boosting procedure. Results indicate that the fastest speed at which a face can be recognized is around 360–390 ms. Such latencies are about 100 ms longer than the latencies recorded in similar tasks in which subjects have to detect faces among other stimuli. We discuss which model of activation of the visual ventral stream could account for such latencies. These latencies are not consistent with a purely feed-forward pass of activity throughout the visual ventral stream. An alternative is that face recognition relies on the core network underlying face processing identified in fMRI studies (OFA, FFA, and pSTS) and reentrant loops to refine face representation. However, the model of activation favored is that of an activation of the whole visual ventral stream up to anterior areas, such as the perirhinal cortex, combined with parallel and feed-back processes. Further studies are needed to assess which of these three models of activation can best account for face recognition.

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“…This 250–290 ms limit is now regarded as a reference when discussing the speed of the visual system and has been useful in attempts to identify the brain mechanisms underlying visual processes at the superordinate level (e.g., Liu et al, 2009; Mack and Palmeri, 2011; DiCarlo et al, 2012). In contrast, recognizing famous faces among unknown ones appears to take much longer (from 431 to 875 ms, Kampf et al, 2002; Herzmann et al, 2004; Caharel et al, 2005; Boehm and Paller, 2006; Paller et al, 2007; Baird and Burton, 2008). Even studies relying on priming, which should enhance speed, report rather lengthy RTs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How fast is famous face recognition?

2012

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The rapid recognition of familiar faces is crucial for social interactions. However the actual speed with which recognition can be achieved remains largely unknown as most studies have been carried out without any speed constraints. Different paradigms have been used, leading to conflicting results, and although many authors suggest that face recognition is fast, the speed of face recognition has not been directly compared to “fast” visual tasks. In this study, we sought to overcome these limitations. Subjects performed three tasks, a familiarity categorization task (famous faces among unknown faces), a superordinate categorization task (human faces among animal ones), and a gender categorization task. All tasks were performed under speed constraints. The results show that, despite the use of speed constraints, subjects were slow when they had to categorize famous faces: minimum reaction time was 467 ms, which is 180 ms more than during superordinate categorization and 160 ms more than in the gender condition. Our results are compatible with a hierarchy of face processing from the superordinate level to the familiarity level. The processes taking place between detection and recognition need to be investigated in detail.

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A serial test of the laterality of familiar face recognition

Cited by 28 publications

References 58 publications

Fixation patterns during recognition of personally familiar and unfamiliar faces

Fixation patterns during recognition of personally familiar and unfamiliar faces

Fast and Famous: Looking for the Fastest Speed at Which a Face Can be Recognized

How fast is famous face recognition?

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