Expert Face Recognition: The Influence of Experience

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Two pictures of the same person can look very different and pictures of two different people can look very similar. Thus, accurate face recognition requires both discrimination (telling people apart) and identity matching (recognizing a person when his/her appearance changes). The objective of my research is to understand the mechanisms underlying the development of expert face recognition across the lifespan. To do so, I take two approaches. First, I examine how face recognition and the underlying mechanisms change across the lifespan (e.g., as children encounter an increasing number of new faces and during old age). Second, I compare adults' ability to recognize identity in faces from categories with which they have abundant (e.g., own-race, young adult) vs. minimal (other-race, older adult) experience. I propose doing so using three approaches. The first focuses on a largely ignored challenge: Recognizing a face despite natural variability in appearance (changes in hairstyle, makeup, viewpoint). This is the challenge faced by passport officers and an ability that allows us to recognize our neighbour when she dons new glasses. Doing so is difficult when faces are unfamiliar, especially for children and for adults viewing other-race faces. I will investigate the process by which a face becomes sufficiently familiar to allow such recognition and how that process changes across the lifespan and differs across face categories. The second focuses on whether reliance on two cues to facial identity—face shape and face texture—varies as a function of familiarity, perceiver age, and face category. Adults rely on face shape (feature shape and spacing) to learn new own-race faces but face texture (skin tone) to recognize them, a pattern most evident in good recognizers. I will manipulate the salience of shape versus texture cues to examine whether age-related differences in face recognition can be attributed to reduced sensitivity to face shape during learning and/or a failure to rely on texture as a face becomes familiar. I will conduct a parallel study to examine whether the same pattern might underlie poor recognition of other-race/age faces. The third project focuses on how limitations in visual working memory affect face recognition. Learning a new face requires the perceiver to store separate instances and/or to build an average; both mechanisms require the observer to encode a face, an ability that is reflected in visual working memory. I will measure the capacity and precision of working memory and compare these across age groups (children, young adults, older adults) and face categories (e.g., young vs. older adult faces; own- vs. other-race faces). Together, the results will provide novel insights about how face perception becomes finely tuned to environmental input across the lifespan.**