TY - JOUR
T1 - Learning to recognize face shapes through serial exploration
AU - Wallraven, Christian
AU - Whittingstall, Lisa
AU - Bülthoff, Heinrich H.
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments This research was supported by a Ph.D. stipend from the Max Planck Society, by the World Class University (WCU) program through the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology (R31-1008-000-10008-0), and through the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology (2010-0011569).
PY - 2013/5
Y1 - 2013/5
N2 - Human observers are experts at visual face recognition due to specialized visual mechanisms for face processing that evolve with perceptual expertize. Such expertize has long been attributed to the use of configural processing, enabled by fast, parallel information encoding of the visual information in the face. Here we tested whether participants can learn to efficiently recognize faces that are serially encoded - that is, when only partial visual information about the face is available at any given time. For this, ten participants were trained in gaze-restricted face recognition in which face masks were viewed through a small aperture controlled by the participant. Tests comparing trained with untrained performance revealed (1) a marked improvement in terms of speed and accuracy, (2) a gradual development of configural processing strategies, and (3) participants' ability to rapidly learn and accurately recognize novel exemplars. This performance pattern demonstrates that participants were able to learn new strategies to compensate for the serial nature of information encoding. The results are discussed in terms of expertize acquisition and relevance for other sensory modalities relying on serial encoding.
AB - Human observers are experts at visual face recognition due to specialized visual mechanisms for face processing that evolve with perceptual expertize. Such expertize has long been attributed to the use of configural processing, enabled by fast, parallel information encoding of the visual information in the face. Here we tested whether participants can learn to efficiently recognize faces that are serially encoded - that is, when only partial visual information about the face is available at any given time. For this, ten participants were trained in gaze-restricted face recognition in which face masks were viewed through a small aperture controlled by the participant. Tests comparing trained with untrained performance revealed (1) a marked improvement in terms of speed and accuracy, (2) a gradual development of configural processing strategies, and (3) participants' ability to rapidly learn and accurately recognize novel exemplars. This performance pattern demonstrates that participants were able to learn new strategies to compensate for the serial nature of information encoding. The results are discussed in terms of expertize acquisition and relevance for other sensory modalities relying on serial encoding.
KW - Face processing strategies
KW - Face recognition
KW - Learning
KW - Perceptual expertize
KW - Serial encoding
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84877873982&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s00221-013-3463-y
DO - 10.1007/s00221-013-3463-y
M3 - Article
C2 - 23468160
AN - SCOPUS:84877873982
VL - 226
SP - 513
EP - 523
JO - Experimental Brain Research
JF - Experimental Brain Research
SN - 0014-4819
IS - 4
ER -