Abstract
Background: Studies show that the information from the upper half of a face plays a greater role in the recognition of facial identity than the lower half. However, in daily life faces are usually encountered as dynamic stimuli, and recent research has shown that dynamic signatures in facial motion contribute to face recognition. Given that the lower half of the face has more mobile structures, this raises the question whether the upper face advantage is also present with dynamic faces. Objective: Our goal was to determine the relative contribution of the upper and lower face in a short-term face familiarity task. Methods: During the encoding phase, 30 subjects learned 12 whole faces, six as static images and six as dynamic video-clips. During the retrieval phase, subjects saw upper or lower halves and reported which of 3 stimuli belonged to one of the learned set. Half of the subjects saw static images and half saw video-clips in the retrieval phase.. Results: There was an interaction between image type at encoding and retrieval, with 10% better recognition when faces were learned from dynamic video-clips than from static images, but only when tested with dynamic stimuli. Regardless of the type of learning, testing with static images showed a small 3% advantage for the upper face, whereas testing with dynamic images had a .3% advantage for the lower face, but these differences were too small to be significant or to generate an interaction involving face halves. Conclusion: Dynamic presentation of faces enhance encoding of identity, but the influence of face-half at retrieval is modest or non-existent.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017