Carryover of scanning behaviour affects upright face recognition differently to inverted face recognition

Hills, PJ; Mileva, M; Thompson, C; Pake, JM

Abstract

Face perception is characterised by a distinct scanpath (Althoff & Cohen, 1999). While eye movements are considered functional, there has not been direct evidence that disrupting this scanpath affects face recognition performance. The present experiment investigated the influence of an irrelevant letter-search task (with letter strings arranged horizontally, vertically or randomly) on the subsequent scanning strategies in processing upright and inverted famous faces. Participants' response time to identify the face and the direction of their first eye movement were recorded. The orientation of the letter search influenced saccadic direction when viewing the face images, such that a direct carryover-effect was observed. Following a vertically oriented letter-search task, the recognition of famous faces was slower and less accurate for upright faces, and faster for inverted faces. These results extend the carryover findings of Thompson and Crundall (2011) into a novel domain. Crucially they also indicate that upright and inverted faces are better processed by different eye movements, highlighting the importance of scanpaths in face recognition.

Citation

Hills, P., Mileva, M., Thompson, C., & Pake, J. (2017). Carryover of scanning behaviour affects upright face recognition differently to inverted face recognition. Visual Cognition, 24(9-10), 459-472. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2017.1314399

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 26, 2017
• Online Publication Date: May 2, 2017
• Publication Date: May 2, 2017
• Deposit Date: May 10, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 2, 2019
• Journal: Visual Cognition
• Print ISSN: 1350-6285
• Electronic ISSN: 1464-0716
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis
• Volume: 24
• Issue: 9-10
• Pages: 459-472
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2017.1314399
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2017.1314399
• Related Public URLs: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13506285.asp