Two Routes to Face Perception: Evidence From Psychophysics and Computational Modeling

Abstract

The aim of this study was to separately analyze the role of featural and configural face representations. Stimuli containing only featural information were created by cutting the faces into their parts and scrambling them. Stimuli only containing configural information were created by blurring the faces. Employing an old-new recognition task, the aim of Experiments 1 and 2 was to investigate whether unfamiliar faces (Exp. 1) or familiar faces (Exp. 2) can be recognized if only featural or configural information is provided. Both scrambled and blurred faces could be recognized above chance level. A further aim of Experiments 1 and 2 was to investigate whether our method of creating configural and featural stimuli is valid. Pre-activation of one form of representation did not facilitate recognition of the other, neither for unfamiliar faces (Exp. 1) nor for familiar faces (Exp. 2). This indicates a high internal validity of our method for creating configural and featural face stimuli. Experiment 3 examined whether features placed in their correct categorical relational position but with distorted metrical distances facilitated recognition of unfamiliar faces. These faces were recognized no better than the scrambled faces in Experiment 1, providing further evidence that facial features are stored independently of configural information. From these results we conclude that both featural and configural information are important to recognize a face and argue for a dual-mode hypothesis of face processing. Using the psychophysical results as motivation, we propose a computational framework that implements featural and configural processing routes using an appearance-based representation based on local features and their spatial relations. In three computational experiments (Experiments 4-6) using the same sets of stimuli, we show how this framework is able to model the psychophysical data.

Emotion Recognition: The Role of Featural and Configural Face Information

“…However, her study differed from ours in that she presented emotional expressions only for 100 ms, while we presented them until the participants responded. Thus, in Prkachin's study the short presentation time could have biased participants towards a configural mode of processing, as detailed analysis of features requires more time (Schwaninger et al, 2009). This could explain the different sensitivity to inversion in the two studies.…”

Human Perception of Visual Realism for Photo and Computer-Generated Face Images

“…Many studies suggest that both featural (piecemeal) and configural (holistic) processing make important contributions to face recognition [Sergent 1984;Cabeza and Kato 2000;Collishaw and Hole 2000;Ingvalson and Wenger 2005;Rhodes et al 2006;Schwaninger et al 2009;. Moreover, these two processes are dissociable [Cabeza and Kato 2000;Schwaninger et al 2009;, suggesting a dual-model hypothesis [Ingvalson and Wenger 2005;Schwaninger et al 2009;.…”

“…Moreover, these two processes are dissociable [Cabeza and Kato 2000;Schwaninger et al 2009;, suggesting a dual-model hypothesis [Ingvalson and Wenger 2005;Schwaninger et al 2009;. Research has also shown that recognition of novel faces, compared to learned faces, relies relatively more on the processing of 7:4 • S. Fan et al featural information.…”

Face-specific capacity limits under perceptual load do not depend on holistic processing

“…For example, Schwaninger and colleagues (Schwaninger, Lobmaier, Wallraven, & Collishaw, 2009) compared faces with faces that had their features spatially scrambled. They found that the part-scrambled versions were not more difficult to recognise than the faces in which features were placed in their correct categorical relational position but with distorted metrical distances, which indicates a featural route to face recognition.…”