Configurational Information in Face Perception

Abstract

A new facial composites technique is demonstrated, in which photographs of the top and bottom halves of different familiar faces fuse to form unfamiliar faces when aligned with each other. The perception of a novel configuration in such composite stimuli is sufficiently convincing to interfere with identification of the constituent parts (experiment 1), but this effect disappears when stimuli are inverted (experiment 2). Difficulty in identifying the parts of upright composites is found even for stimuli made from parts of unfamiliar faces that have only ever been encountered as face fragments (experiment 3). An equivalent effect is found for composites made from internal and external facial features of well-known people (experiment 4). These findings demonstrate the importance of configurational information in face perception, and that configurations are only properly perceived in upright faces.

Spatial Frequency and Face Processing in Children with Autism and Asperger Syndrome

“…These latter findings indicate that autistic individuals attend to the local aspects of faces rather than to the whole structure. This preference for the local facial information is in opposition with the configural advantage in face processing found in the normal adult population (Carey & Diamond, 1977;Rhodes, 1988;Tanaka & Farah, 1993;Young, Hellawell, & Hay, 1987) and during childhood (Baenninger, 1994;Carey & Diamond, 1994;Deruelle & de Schonen, 1998;Lundy, 2000;Tanaka, Kay, Grinnell, Stansfield, & Szechter, 1998).…”

The development of facial emotion recognition: The role of configural information

“…This topic of investigation is quite important because configural information also plays a significant role in facial emotion recognition by adults. Calder , Young, Keane, and Dean (2000;see also Calder & Jansen, 2005) observed a composite effect in emotion recognition similar to the one reported by Young, Hellawell, and Hay (1987) in face recognition; that is, when the top and bottom halves of a composite face depict different emotions, recognition of the emotion in either half is slower and less accurate than when the composite face is inverted or the two halves are offset laterally. Thus, it can be hypothesized, as for face recognition, that the development of the ability to process configural properties of faces also underlies the development of the ability to process facial emotions.The main aim of the current research concerned the possible role of configural information in the development of recognition of facial emotions.…”

Improving the quality of facial composites using a holistic cognitive interview.

“…This finding is particularly interesting given the importance of relational information to face recognition (e.g. Leder & Carbon, 2006;O'Donnell & Bruce, 2001;Young, Hellawell & Hay, 1987) and suggests that witnesses who achieve a better configuration of features are likely to produce a more identifiable composite. Unfortunately, the rating data also suggest that relational information was not a better match with the target following the holistic interview.…”