Learning the moves: the effect of familiarity and facial motion on person recognition across large changes in viewing format.

Full Abstract

Familiarity with a face or person can support recognition in tasks that require generalization to novel viewing contexts. Using naturalistic viewing conditions requiring recognition of people from face or whole body gait stimuli, we investigated the effects of familiarity, facial motion, and direction of learning/test transfer on person recognition. Participants were familiarized with previously unknown people from gait videos and were tested on faces (experiment 1a) or were familiarized with faces and were tested with gait videos (experiment 1b). Recognition was more accurate when learning from the face and testing with the gait videos, than when learning from the gait videos and testing with the face. The repetition of a single stimulus, either the face or gait, produced strong recognition gains across transfer conditions. Also, the presentation of moving faces resulted in better performance than that of static faces. In experiment 2, we investigated the role of facial motion further by testing recognition with static profile images. Motion provided no benefit for recognition, indicating that structure-from-motion is an unlikely source of the motion advantage found in the first set of experiments.

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Author information

Author/s: Roark, Dana A (DA); O'Toole, Alice J (AJ); Abdi, Hervé (H); Barrett, Susan E (SE);

Affiliation: School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75083-0688, USA. danar(-atsign-)utdallas.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

Journal: Perception (Perception), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2006-; vol 35 (issue 6) : pp 761-73

Dates: Created 2006/07/13; Completed 2006/10/10; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 16836043, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Adult
Face - physiology
Facial Expression
Female
Gait
Generalization (Psychology)
Humans
Learning

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