An investigation into the importance of the eyes and mouth in face recognition for 16-18 year old male and female sixth form students.

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Introduction

Recognition, identification and recall of faces are necessary skills that nearly every body uses every single day. Information used to identify a person doesn’t just come from just their face, but also from people’s clothing, voice, mannerisms and where they are seen. Sometimes a person may struggle to recognise someone because they are not in their usual context or are wearing unusual clothes, for example.

Cohen (1989) distinguished between:

  • Face identification: looking at a person’s face and knowing who it is;
  • Face recognition recognising the face as one we have seen before;
  • Face recall: when, from memory, we try to verbally describe a face, draw a face or form a ‘mental image’ of the face.

There are two main explanations for face recognition. Firstly, there is the Feature-analysis theory, a bottom-up theory. It suggests that analysing individual features is the most important factor in face recognition. The visual cues from a face we look at are the most important information for recognition, and therefore we need to focus on the detail of the face, looking mainly at the separate features. Visual cues include the way the light and shade appear on a face and also the texture of hair and skin. All of the visual cues combine to let us observe the broader features of the face like the shape of the eyes or mouth. Ellis et al. (1979) showed that we tend to use internal features when recalling faces of familiar people, supporting the feature analysis theory of face recognition when recalling a face. This studies’ findings can be refuted as Shepherd et al. (1981) found the opposite to be true. He investigated the importance of different features, with participants being shown unfamiliar faces for a brief period of time. They were then asked to describe the faces from memory, with the features most often used being hair, eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows, chin and forehead, in that order, showing internal features were used to recall unfamiliar faces.

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Secondly, there is the Holistic-form theory. This is an alternative to the feature analysis approach. Although visual cues and facial features are important in describing faces and do have a role in face recognition, relying just on bottom-up processing for this very complex process is unlikely. Bruce and Young (1986) proposed a top-down approach, suggesting that face recognition requires the use of stored semantic and emotional information, and is more complex than simply putting together different features. According to the holistic approach, a face is recognised as a whole, looking at the relationship between features, feelings caused by the face ...

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