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.
Method: Participants kept a daily diary of problems in face recognition. They were then analysed for content.
Results: From 1008 incidents recorded, not once was a person able to put a name to a face without knowing something else about the person. There were 190 instances where the person could remember a good bit of information about the individual but could not name him/her.
Faces may be recognised from very little information. Some past researches have shown that only one part of the face is enough for a person to recognize the whole face.
Aim: Sadr et al (2003) tested facial features holistically
Method: Showed one feature of the face mainly the eye or eyebrow to a person and asked them if they could identify the person.
Results: The holistic context seems to affect how individual features are processed. When the 2 halves of the faces are joined together then it is easily recognised.
The experiment I will be conducting is very similar to this. The aim of my study is to investigate whether females could recognize more familiar faces (which have been inverted) than males. The independent variable (IV) is pictures of famous celebrities inverted and the dependant variable (DV) is the time taken between males and females to recognize each face. My hypothesis is that males will be able to recognize more faces than females.
Aim: the aim of this experiment is to find out if gender has an effect on the reaction to recognising inverted celebrity faces.
Experimental hypothesis: 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.
Null Hypothesis: 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.
Method
Design
This method involves the ability to recognise people by their facial characteristics e.g. nose and ears. A variable is anything that can vary i.e. changed or be changed. Independent Variable (IV) is when the experimenter manipulates and assumed to have direct effect on the dependent variable. Dependant variable (DV) is when the experimenter measures, after making changes to the IV that are assumed to affect the DV.
Remembering and recognizing faces is an important skill we apply each day of our lives. It is important to our social interactions, to work and school activities, and in our personal family lives. Although most of the research in this area has been undertaken on 'faces' it is in fact rare in real life that we need to identify someone from their face alone. Information from a person's clothes, voice, mannerisms etc and the context in which we encounter them all help in the identification process.
The DV for this method is the time it takes for a participant to recognise 6 randomly chosen pictures when shown upside down, also known as inverted. The IV for this investigation is the change of the image. The 1st image will contain 14 celebrities shown perfectly without modifications all fitted onto 1 sheet for 10 seconds, then 6 images will be shown separately whilst inverted and the dependant variable will be the time it takes to identify the picture in seconds. The result can be affected depending on the participant’s knowledge of the pictures shown, and how well they can recognise the image.
An experimental method is a type of research method in which you ask participants to take part in. 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. Field experiments are similar to laboratory experiments as they involve control of IV, the use of participants and surroundings, field experiments can also be replicated. Example of Field experiment Abernethy (1940) showed that students performed better if they were tested in the same room where they were taught and tested by the same person. The experiment will have manipulated variables that will test the hypothesis, proving it correct or incorrect.
The advantages of carrying out a field experiment are that, as the participant will be in his/her own natural surroundings, they will not be aware that they are in an experiment and so, there is a lower chance of demand characteristics affecting the experiment. In addition, the natural surroundings will also allow the results gained from the experiment to be more generalised as evidence to test your hypothesis.
The disadvantages of carrying out a field experiment are firstly, it is difficult to control extraneous variables. Secondly it is difficult to replicate as all environments are different. Thirdly, the precision measurement is problematic and last but not least ethics which include consent which whenever possible should always be got from participants, also deception which is not allowed if participants would be unlikely to co-operate without it, it the researcher is in doubt, he or she should seek help from their teacher or lecturer and lastly privacy of results and personal information,
The reasons for not choosing a laboratory experiment or a natural experiment are that, in a laboratory experiment, you have a higher chance of experiencing demand characteristics, and you cannot manipulate the variables in a natural experiment. A demand characteristic occurs when the participant tries to please or go against the experimenter’s hypothesis, after they have guessed what the experimenter is trying to test.
As the experiment was taking place, it had 1 extraneous variable. These are all variables, which are not the IV, but could affect the results and DV of the experiment. EV should be controlled were possible. They might be important enough to provide alternative explanations for the effects. There are two types of EV; Situational variables and participant/person variables. For this experiment the situational variables affected the DV which was the high level of noise in the canteen and the temperature. This was uncontrollable and effected the participant’s concentration which may have affected the final results. The experimenter was incapable to quieten the voice and drop the high temperature.
Participants
The geographical location for the experiment to take place is at St Mary’s College in the canteen. St Mary’s College consist of students aged between 16 and 18 both male and female. The target population for this experiment is teenagers ageing between 16 and 18 and educating in A-levels and St Mary’s College. The canteen had a lot of students and was quite busy at the time of the experiment; this was beneficial as it attracted a smaller audience as the place of experiment was well covered by students. How ever the level of noise affected the concentration of the participants. This experiment involved 10 boys and 10 girls from year 12 and 13. This is because the results could show which gender has better recognition skills. The college consist of students from many different backgrounds and ethnicities. A few are, white Christian, black Christian, Indian Muslim, Pakistani Muslim, Chinese and African. The experiment uses opportunity sampling so the 1st 20 people matching the criteria will be used, therefore it may not contain people from all backgrounds.
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. It consists of taking the sample from people who are available at the time the study is carried out and fit the criteria you are looking for. 10 boys and 10 girls from both years volunteered to take part in the experiment. However they were unaware of themselves being timed. It is a popular sampling technique as it is easy in terms of time and therefore money. For example the researcher may use friends, family or colleagues. It can also be seen as adequate when investigating processes which are thought to work in similar ways for most individuals such as memory processes. Sometimes, particularly with natural experiments opportunity sampling has to be used as the researcher has no control over who is studied.
However, there are a few weaknesses of opportunity sampling. Opportunity sampling can produce a biased sample as it is easy for the researcher to choose people from their own social and cultural group. This sample would therefore not be representative of your target population as you friends may have different qualities to people in general. A further problem with opportunity sampling is that participants may decline to take part and your sampling technique may turn into a self selected sample. Finally, there is a difficulty when using opportunity sampling to generalise your results to a meaningful target population. If your opportunity sample was 10 first year pupils from a large college anything you might infer from a survey could only be applied to this small unrepresentative group.
Materials
There will be a wide range of material required to carry out this experiment. The most important is the pictures of faces which the experimenter is using to show the participants. The pictures will be off famous celebrity’s which are very popular with the world e.g. David Beckham. The reason you can’t use less famous celebrities is because people may not know the person even before the pictures are re shown scrambled. Before the experiment is carried out the participants are required to fill in a consent form.
The consent form will have details of the experiment and simple instructions. The participants have the free will to leave at any time of the experiment; they also have the right to remove their data from the results. In this experiment the participant are unaware they are being timed, so they will be fully debriefed after the experiment. The consent form will have to be signed at the bottom. As the experiment finishes and the participants are debriefed, they will be told to fill in a questionnaire.
The pictures used to test the participants are
- Brad Pitt
- Michael Jackson
- Tony Blair
- Beyonce Knowles
- Angelina Julie
- Sharon Osborne
These pictures are chosen because they are very familiar with the students at St Mary’s College. The data received from the experiment will be recorded into a table which will then be used for other cases such as evaluation and designing graphs.
All the materials will be shown in the appendix
Procedure
Participants were approached in the college canteen and asked “would like to take part in an experiment carried out on table 13?” If the answer was yes, they will be shown table 13 and given the form of consent to read alongside with the instructions. Again the participant is asked do you still want to take part in this investigation, and are reminded it’s up to them and they can leave at any time. As the participant is ready he/she is seated in a reserved seat and shown 14 pictures all on one page, consisting of 7famous 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. If the participant at any time wants to stop to ask for advice, he/she may do so. The participant is timed to guess which person it is in the inverted pictures. If the participant takes more than a minute on a single picture and still can’t figure it out, then the picture is replaced with the next one. The time is recorded in a table. As the participant finishes with the pictures, he/she will be shown a debriefing form which tells them that they where being timed and thanks them for their participation.
Following the research, especially where any deception or withholding of information had taken place, the Committee wished to emphasise the importance of appropriate debriefing. In some circumstances, the verbal description of the nature of the investigation would not be sufficient to eliminate all possibility of harmful after-effects. For example, an experiment in which negative mood was induced requires the induction of a happy mood state before the participant leaves the experimental setting. (http://www.bps.org.uk/the-society)
The final results will be compared using various methods such as scatter graphs and pie charts. The experiment should find weather males or females are better at recognising inverted pictures of celebrities or neither.
Results
The aim of this experiment was to find out if the different gender has an effect on face recognition. My hypothesis states women will have better reaction and knowledge than men at recognising faces upside down.
The pie chart shows the percentage for the time taken to recognised 6 inverted pictures. Series 1 is the female section and it is larger as it took females longer overall to recognise the 6 inverted images. Where as for the males its only 39% as males overall were faster than females. Participant 18 and participant 4 were the quickest. This shows both males and females have the ability of recognising faces at a high speed as the scores were from each gender. Participant 20 too 120secs to name the 6 celebrities, this maybe because she was fooling around and not taking the experiment seriously or she had very little knowledge of the celebrities shown to her.
The experimental hypothesis for this experiment is one tailed. The hypothesis states females will be able to recognise a number of upside down faces more effectively than men.
The null hypothesis for this experiment is there will be no significant difference between the recognition results of men or women.
From carrying out the experiment, it shows both experimental and null hypothesis were wrong as men had a quicker time in recognising the faces according to the mode and mean. This is because the mean for men 22.5 was and the mean for women was 34.7. Also the null hypothesis is wrong as there was a large difference in the results from both genders.
Discussion
From completing the experiment we can see that males completed the experiment faster than females which goes against the experimental hypothesis. The null hypothesis states 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. From the results we can see participant 20 had an odd result which made a significant difference in the female average. We can that without participant 20 the average for both genders would have been very similar. The mean for the females minus participant 20 would have been 25.222 which are better than the male mean of 28.6. So if participant 20 had not been entered into the results then the experimental hypothesis would have been accepted.
In the past similar experiments have shown females have a better knowledge of the celebrity world as they have a lot of interest in magazines, movies and celebrity lives. However this experiment finished showing men have better facial recognition skills than females, this is understandable as participant 20 took 120secs to bring the female average to above the male average.
The target population used to for this investigation is tremendously liable for the results outcome as the age ranges used is incredibly interested in the celebrity world and have large knowledge about it. If the experiment used people aged over 65 then certainly the results would have differed.
The conclusion for this experiment is that the human mind has the ability to recognise inverted faces of those who they have knowledge and interest about. If a person was shown an inverted face of someone they have only seen once in their lives then it would be very difficult for them to recognise them. The experiment shows gender does not have a great effect on the outcome but the amount of interest of the celebrity does. Participant 20 had very little interest of the celebrity world which made her recognition speed very slow but did manage to complete the activity.
If this experiment was to be replicated but in a better way then you should consider; firstly, using coloured pictures of celebrities rather than black and white as colour would make it easier for the participant to recognise who the person is. Secondly, the experiment only used people from 2 backgrounds Asian Indian and British White; you could consider using a larger variety of ethnic backgrounds to improve the fairness of the investigation. It is very easy for the researcher to choose people from his/her background as it would be easier for the researcher to ask them rather than ask people from other backgrounds, this should be prevented to make the experiment fairer. Thirdly, a few of the pictures used in the investigation were at a slight angle making the image harder to recognise. The pictures should have the face facing directly to the participant and not slightly to the side. Fourthly, the researcher can carry out a preliminary test to check weather the observation would have been successful or not. This is cheap and would save a lot of money if the main experiment wasn’t to go to plan. Finally, the researcher can use a larger variety for the target population, instead of just testing 16 to 18 year olds; the researcher can use different age ranges to determine a better result and fairer test.
After completing the experiment the research can carry out further investigation to determine his results and hypothesis is correct. The researcher can use a reaction game to determine which gender has faster reactions. Also the researcher can use techniques to determine a genders speed such as, putting a mobile phone on vibrate in a jacket which has to be worn by the participant, then ringing the phone and timing the reaction of the participant to remove the phone from the jacket and answer it. There are various methods of checking which gender has the better speed. For the facial recognition you can make a page with 100 tiny pictures of people’s faces, and have one face which the participant has to find, someone they are aware of such as the head teacher of their college. These further experiment will certainly determine if the null hypothesis or the experimental hypothesis is correct or Evan neither.
For this experiment the researcher used opportunity sampling to select 20 participants, 10 males and 10 females. They told that they were taking part in an experiment and were made to read and sign a consent form. The experiment method used was field experiment. The participants were shown 14 pictures on 1 sheet of paper of famous celebrities for 30 seconds. After shown for 30 seconds the participant was given a 5 second pause and then shown 6 inverted images one by one and were timed without the participant knowing. The 6 images shown were pre selected from the 14 shown before by the researcher. As they completed the experiment the participant were shown a debriefing form which told them about the whole experiment and also told them they were being timed.
Overall the experiment showed there is not a lot of difference between genders on facial recognition. The null hypothesis was proved correct. The results for the experiment are shown below and in the appendix.
The bar chart shows both genders recognized the inverted faces at a steady time. Both genders completed the experiment the fastest, participant 4 and participant 18 both completed the experiment in 11 seconds. This shows both genders have the ability to recognize inverted faces very fast. Participant 20 showed not all people have the ability to recognize inverted faces at a steady speed, or not all people have a great knowledge about celebrities.
Consent form
Dear participant,
This experiment is a study of face recognition.
The experiment will take place at St Mary’s College 13/02/06 in the canteen at lunchtime (12.40-1.25). This experiment involves 10 boys and 10 girls from year 12 or year 13. You will be seated in a comfortable area were you will spare a few minutes of your time. You have the right to withdraw yourself from the study or stop at any time during the experiment.
If you wish to take part in this experiment please fill in the form below.
If you have any further questions please feel free to talk to me and ask.
Thank you for your time.
Z.Patel. (investigator)
(Zulfikar Patel)
Results