Individual differences in perceiving and recognizing faces—One element of social cognition.

Abstract

Recognizing faces swiftly and accurately is of paramount importance to humans as a social species. Individual differences in the ability to perform these tasks may therefore reflect important aspects of social or emotional intelligence. Although functional models of face cognition based on group and single case studies postulate multiple component processes, little is known about the ability structure underlying individual differences in face cognition. In 2 large individual differences experiments (N = 151 and N = 209), a broad variety of face-cognition tasks were tested and the component abilities of face cognition-face perception, face memory, and the speed of face cognition-were identified and then replicated. Experiment 2 also showed that the 3 face-cognition abilities are clearly distinct from immediate and delayed memory, mental speed, general cognitive ability, and object cognition. These results converge with functional and neuroanatomical models of face cognition by demonstrating the difference between face perception and face memory. The results also underline the importance of distinguishing between speed and accuracy of face cognition. Together our results provide a first step toward establishing face-processing abilities as an independent ability reflecting elements of social intelligence.

The development of face expertise: Evidence for a qualitative change in processing

“…This is not to suggest that configural processing cannot be done prior to the age of 10, but that its reliable and constant use is not likely before that age. Indeed, the effects of inversion may be unrelated to other measures of "configural" coding (such as the parts and wholes test; Konar, Bennett, & Sekuler, 2010;Wilhelm et al, 2010). Nevertheless, the results from this study are reliable given the internal replication and the robust statistical procedures employed.…”

Correlations between psychometric schizotypy, scan path length, fixations on the eyes and face recognition

“…This implies that there are other variables that explain this link that we have not explored in the present study. Face processing is highly specialised with dedicated and distributed neural processing (Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2000) that is thought to be unrelated to general cognition (Wilhelm, Herzmann, Kunina, Danthiir, Schacht, & Sommer, 2010). Given this, the remaining part of the mediation between schizotypy and face recognition is not likely to be cognitive in nature, but rather due to motivational factors.…”

Individual differences in personality and face identification

“…In addition, the previous research in this field has examined the role of personality in face processing with recognition memory paradigms. Face perception and memory appear to be separable components (see, e.g., Herzmann, Kunina, Sommer, & Wilhelm, 2009;Wilhelm et al, 2010;Megreya & Burton, 2008) that can be manipulated to produce different task outcomes (see, e.g., Bindemann, Sandford, Gillatt, Avetisyan, & Megreya, 2012).…”