Predominance of eyes and surface information for face race categorization.

Faces can be categorized in various ways, for example as male or female or as belonging to a specific biogeographic ancestry (race). Here we tested the importance of the main facial features for race perception. We exchanged inner facial features (eyes, mouth or nose), face contour (everything but those) or texture (surface information) between Asian and Caucasian faces. Features were exchanged one at a time, creating for each Asian/Caucasian face pair ten facial variations of the original face pair. German and Korean participants performed a race classification task on all faces presented in random order. The results show that eyes and texture are major determinants of perceived biogeographic ancestry for both groups of participants and for both face types. Inserting these features in a face of another race changed its perceived biogeographic ancestry. Contour, nose and mouth, in that order, had decreasing and much weaker influence on race perception for both participant groups. Exchanging those features did not induce a change of perceived biogeographic ancestry. In our study, all manipulated features were imbedded in natural looking faces, which were shown in an off-frontal view. Our findings confirm and extend previous studies investigating the importance of various facial features for race perception.

The contribution of foveal and peripheral visual information to ensemble representation of face race.

The brain can only attend to a fraction of all the information that is entering the visual system at any given moment. One way of overcoming the so-called bottleneck of selective attention (e.g., J. M. Wolfe, Võ, Evans, & Greene, 2011) is to make use of redundant visual information and extract summarized statistical information of the whole visual scene. Such ensemble representation occurs for low-level features of textures or simple objects, but it has also been reported for complex high-level properties. While the visual system has, for example, been shown to compute summary representations of facial expression, gender, or identity, it is less clear whether perceptual input from all parts of the visual field contributes equally to the ensemble percept. Here we extend the line of ensemble-representation research into the realm of race and look at the possibility that ensemble perception relies on weighting visual information differently depending on its origin from either the fovea or the visual periphery. We find that observers can judge the mean race of a set of faces, similar to judgments of mean emotion from faces and ensemble representations in low-level domains of visual processing. We also find that while peripheral faces seem to be taken into account for the ensemble percept, far more weight is given to stimuli presented foveally than peripherally. Whether this precision weighting of information stems from differences in the accuracy with which the visual system processes information across the visual field or from statistical inferences about the world needs to be determined by further research.

A familiarity disadvantage for remembering specific images of faces.

Familiar faces are remembered better than unfamiliar faces. Furthermore, it is much easier to match images of familiar than unfamiliar faces. These findings could be accounted for by quantitative differences in the ease with which faces are encoded. However, it has been argued that there are also some qualitative differences in familiar and unfamiliar face processing. Unfamiliar faces are held to rely on superficial, pictorial representations, whereas familiar faces invoke more abstract representations. Here we present 2 studies that show, for 1 task, an advantage for unfamiliar faces. In recognition memory, viewers are better able to reject a new picture, if it depicts an unfamiliar face. This rare advantage for unfamiliar faces supports the notion that familiarity brings about some representational changes, and further emphasizes the idea that theoretical accounts of face processing should incorporate familiarity. (PsycINFO Database Record