Question

X. Face Recognition

Describe studies and theories that explain face recognition. Are people better at recognizing faces that are different or similar to their own? What does the research say about this?

Analyze the neurological mechanisms that are involved, and explain why.

Answer 1

Feature Analysis theory: A study was carried out by Shepherd, Davies, and Ellis (1981), which supported this theory. This theory is also known as the bottoms up theory. The feature analysis theory says that when we are trying to recognise a face, we look at the individual parts of the face such as the nose, eyes, eyebrows, hairline, mouth etc. This bottoms up approach involves seeing the details of the face, then moving on to see the whole face.

Holistic form theory: An important study to support this theory was done by Young and Hay. This theory is a top-down theory as it says that we recognise face as a whole, and then we later on see the individual parts of the face.

The cross race effect is the tendency of people to recognise faces of their own race better than other races. Research done on this has also supported this theory, where results have shown that people recognise faces of their own race better than other faces.

Some of the neurological mechanism involved in face recognition are that the Amygdala which is the emotion and fear center of the brain is more responsive when viewing the faces of other races than ones one race. These changes may arise due to the perceptions of people towards the other races.

Research on the facial recognition of other races and same race using electroencephalography (EEG) was used to see how the brain activity would be in either case. Surprisingly, the results showed that individual showed brain activity as though they were looking at their own race people, when in fact they were looking at different race people.