Term Paper on "Face Perception"

Term Paper 6 pages (1950 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Perception

It is widely known within the field of psychology that face recognition plays a significant role in early brain development, it is in fact one of the first issues studied with regard to child psychological development. As much of the early research was conducted on children at a very early age, there is a substantial argument that face recognition and its emphasis on symmetry is a nature characteristic rather than one that is learned over time. This work will review current literature on face recognition and attempt to answer several research questions, are faces perceived uniquely from other objects? Are they processed holistically or by parts? And how do we distinguish between different faces, as they are very similar objects in the same category?

The importance of face recognition in human development has been recognized for decades as children have been response tested for their ability to recognize their maternal face as well as many others, as a basis for understanding early socialization and how it impact the development of the individual and the family unit.

A initial responses are as likely to involve the physical parameters of people as their social behaviors. The earliest transaction of interpersonal interaction and person perception may involve some physical properties of the person, particularly of the human face www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=30340245"... An extensive literature exists on infants' recognition of, and response to, the human face. With the exception of research on infants' response to facial form...these studies are based on infants' preferences for stimuli."

(Lamb & Sherrod, 1981, p. 13)

Individuals have also been tested to determine their innate likes and dislikes with regard to the attractiveness or symmetry of a face, and there have been shown to be many genetic links to an almost universal favoring of symmetrical and classically attractive faces, this is postulated as a universal desire to rely upon those most healthy as caregivers and facial malformations genetically are often linked to other more serious health problems. Additionally, holistic face recognition is the leaning of most researchers as they try to determine the functions of the brain, which elicit face recognition, and how. (Pellicano & Rhodes, 2003, pp. 618-619)

Review of the Literature

Infant Face Recognition

Though historically a great deal of research has been done on infant face recognition, noted above, new research is being conducted with regard to the distinctive responses infants have to face recognition with regard to eye movement and other social indicators. The importance of such work is paramount to both understanding of face recognition and also the social importance of direct eye contact.

Newborn babies may not look particularly busy, but they're already hard at work building social proficiency. Consider that, according to a new report, 2-to-5-day-old infants already home in on faces that fix them with a direct gaze and devote less attention to faces with eyes that look to one side. (Bower 2002, Academic Search Elite)

If the importance of eye contact can be seen as early as four months the significance of it as a later indicator for facial and social recognition is paramount to a greater understanding of facial expression and emotion reliance.

What's more, in 4-month-olds, direct eye contact elicits enhanced brain activity associated with face perception, say psychologist Teresa Farroni of the University of London and her colleagues. "The exceptionally early sensitivity to mutual gaze demonstrated in our studies is arguably the major foundation for the later development of social skills," Farroni holds. (Bower 2002, Academic Search Elite)

Adult Face Recognition

Much promising recent research has also been conducted on the location of brain activity in adults during face recognition exercises.

A participants were asked to identify which of 4 male faces was presented in tachistoscopic fashion via computer. Correct recognition of faces was significantly faster in the left visual field (LVF) than in the right visual field (RVF), and the majority of participants exhibited a LVF processing-speed advantage (ADV). However, those participants whose responses to faces were faster in the RVF (RVF ADV) were more accurate at recognizing faces. (Kittler & Turkewitz, 1999, p. 253)

The determinant of a location in the brain where recognition takes place is an important breakthrough in face recognition. Further studies will be analyzed later in this work which are trying to determine the effects of brain damage, due to organic and non-organic situations that has increasing importance for the treatment of alcoholism and even autistism.

Additional work has been done to determine the importance of face recognition during speaking sequences, presumably to determine the importance of the human face as a visual memory tool for retention of learned information. Through lecture style.

A spoken word was incidentally presented simultaneously with each face. This altered hemispheric lateralization for face recognition. There was no longer evidence for LVF responses being faster than RVF ones or for participants with a RVF ADV being better at recognizing faces. However, these participants were superior at an unannounced speech recognition test.

(Kittler & Turkewitz, 1999, p. 253)

This may have serious implications for the increased use of distance technology in education, a topic that is high on the list of many educators in a bid to decrease costs while increasing availability of services to many individuals.

Face Recognition Impairment

There is a great deal of recent research being conducted at this time on the importance of face recognition as a key to normal social and psychological development, as researchers are presently finding a correlation between an individuals inability to perform rudimentary face recognition and the development of autism.

But when toddlers with those warning signs are given intensive training -- 25 hours a week -- on how to recognize faces, among other skills, then one in four is normal by kindergarten. To investigate what goes wrong in the autistic brain, Geraldine Dawson and Elizabeth Aylward of the University of Washington (UW) Autism Center and their colleagues compared brain activity of autistic and normal adolescents and adults while they examined pictures of human faces or cars. (Ferber, 2004, PsychInfo)

While the subject group is a bit older than the traditional face recognition studies the need to understand their responses more clearly indicates such a sample. The interesting part of the study for the researcher is the fact that the importance of face recognition is not only an indicator of problems but may actually be a reflection of the neurobiological formations that create the ability to interact normally with others in the social world.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers found that a brain region called the fusiform gyrus became active in healthy but not autistic subjects when they viewed human faces. Instead, the inferior temporal lobe lit up in autistic subjects. This area was active when normal subjects viewed pictures of cars, suggesting that the autistic subjects' brains are lumping faces together with inanimate objects. (Ferber, 2004, PsychInfo)

Lending evidence to the more recent hypotheses that face recognition may be an important first step for normal interaction and bonding, are many current research designs.

Additional work is being conducted on adults with regard to brain and social deterioration due to drug and alcohol use and abuse. The findings give substantial leanings toward the idea that normal social interaction is impaired by the deterioration of a basic social ability, proven to be learned in infancy or even suggested as innate.

Dysfunction in alcoholics of some specific cognitive functions, including EFE [emotional facial expressions] recognition, could be explained by differences in regional sensitivity, in the brain, to alcohol. Differences among brain regions in the rate of recovery from chronic alcohol exposure may explain differences in the time course of cognitive functions recovery during alcohol detoxification (Volkow et al., 1994). Differential recovery of brain regions implicated in the EFE recognition process could explain why some emotions lead to less decoding errors after abstinence than others. (Kornreich et al., 2001, p. 533)

Alcoholics in recovery have distinctively different abilities to interact with a respond appropriately to emotional facial expressions. The determinant though not completely understood is the damage that alcohol does to the neural pathways, that are suggested to be multifaceted for the recognition of emotional stimulus in normal as well as contrived social situations.

Face Recognition Technology for Security Use

Many of these questions have become increasingly important to the whole of society as more and more people lean toward, biometric identification technology to increase security during travel and also to meet the most recent U.S. demand for biometric identification for all flight passengers entering the United States from foreign countries by October 26, 2004. The historical research has been used to develop ways in which the human identifies faces for recognition and developed the same or similar tactics in a simulate computerized system that is said to scan faces and determine their similarity with those in a database.

Face recognition still seems to be the holy grail. Perhaps it's more acceptable to people than being fingerprinted or iris-scanned. And often if we have any information at all… READ MORE

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