Investigation to find out which gender is better at recognising faces

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Abstract

This investigation was carried out at St Mary’s College, Blackburn by a student for his AS Coursework.  

The aim of the study was to find out weather gender has an effect on facial recognition.  

The experimental hypothesis for this experiment is females will be able to recognise celebrity faces more than men as females stereotypically have a better knowledge of the celebrity world and have greater interest in celebrity lives.  Also the null hypothesis for this experiment is there will be no significant difference between whether males or females will be better at recognizing inverted celebrity faces as each human has its own knowledge about the celebrity world and each gender does not have the upper hand in recognizing them.

The type of experiment method used to carry out this experiment is a field experiment which means it takes place in the participants’ natural or normal environment.  The natural environment for this experiment is the college canteen.  

The selection of my 20 participants was done using opportunity sampling. Opportunity sampling is extremely quick and economical. It is the most common method of sampling because it is convenient.   

The participant is selected and given a consent form which they read and then sign.  When the participant is ready he/she is seated in a reserved seat and shown 14 pictures all on one page, consisting of 7 famous women and 7 famous men.  They will be given 30 seconds to view this sheet of celebrity pictures.  

As the participant finishes observing the pictures they are given a 5 second pause, after the pause they are shown 6 pictures from the 14 shown before, but these pictures are inverted.  During this process the participant is being timed but is unaware of it. As the experiment is completed the participant is given a consent form which tells them what the experiment is designed for and that they were being timed.  

The results are shown below in a bar chart; from the result you can see there is 1 odd result from participant 20.

The experiment shows the experimental hypothesis was stated wrong however if the researcher removes one result (participant 20) it would bring down the female average and prove the experimental hypothesis correct.   The mean average for males and females including participant 20 is males 28.6 and females 34.7, however without participant 20 the female average goes down to 25.2r.   The null hypothesis says there will be no significant difference between whether males or females will be better at recognizing inverted celebrity faces; this is acceptable because it all depends on the person and not the gender.  

The aim of this experiment was to find out if gender has an effect on the reaction to recognising inverted celebrity faces, from the experiment the researcher has shown it is not gender which effects the reaction to recognising inverted celebrity faces.  

Introduction

Do you think you have a great memory? Face recognition tests memory on features of the human face which we see everyday of are lives.  As a human we must have seen over millions of faces but only remember the ones we have associated with a lot e.g. friends and family.  This coursework is to test weather males or females have the better ability to recognize inverted faces.

Face recognition has become a popular area of research in computer vision and one of the most successful applications of image analysis and understanding. Because of the nature of the problem, not only computer science researchers are interested in it, but neuroscientists and psychologists also. It is the general opinion that advances in computer vision research will provide useful insights to neuroscientists and psychologists into how human brain works, and vice versa.

Facial Recognition falls into the category of Gender.  Gender is a psychological term and refers to ideas which we hold about the behaviors, personality and attitude of males and females within a given society.  Differences in biological sex lead us to expect differences in gender roles.  Psychologists have been interested in the cause of these differences since the beginning of psychology itself.  Early psychological theorists suggested that differences were inborn and therefore unchangeable.

Several types of information may be obtained from faces and there are major differences in the processing of familiar and unfamiliar faces.  Recognition of familiar faces depends on firstly structural encoding or visual encoding of the features.  Secondly, face recognition units (FRU) which contain structural information about one face known to the individual. Thirdly, person identity nodes which provide information about the individual (occupation, relationship, friends, etc.) and finally and name generation (names are stored separately from other identifying information).

Recognition of unfamiliar faces depends on firstly, structural encoding of the features.  Secondly, expression analysis (inferring a person’s emotional state from reading facial expression - analysis of their facial features) thirdly, facial speech analysis (observing a speaker’s lips while talking facilitates speech perception and finally, and directed visual processing (selectively processing specific information.

Clinical studies provide fascinating insights into the processes involved in face recognition.  Prosopagnosia is a rare disorder where people could lose there ability to recognize familiar human faces.  In some extreme cases the patients fail to recognize there own reflection.  

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A study involving Bruce & Young (1986) they came up with the following assumption, a face is encoded structurally, meaning we take in the visual information when looking at the face.  If this matches it will activate the Facial Recognition Unit (FRU).  When the FRU is activated it automatically activates the Personal Identity Node (PIN).  The PIN contains information such as interests, occupation, age etc.  The final stage of the process is Name Recognition.  According to Bruce & Young name recognition is stored separately to the FRU and PIN.

Aim: Young, Hay & Ellis (1985) tested out the holistic model.

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