Scientist Live spoke with one of the lead researchers, Roberto Caldara, and discussed his findings.
1. Is face recognition inherent in human beings? What are some of the theories?
Whether human face recognition ability is special is a matter of active debate. However, we believe that human and primate brains have highly sensitive neural populations to process faces. There is also a general consensus regarding human beings not differing in their biological ability to process faces.
2. Tell us about the experiment performed at your laboratory. What did you set out to study and how did you study it?
We recorded the eye movements of Western Caucasian and East Asian observers while they learned, recognized, and categorized Western Caucasian and East Asian faces. None of the previous studies investigating eye movements for faces controlled for the culture of the observers. In addition, I found controlling for this factor interesting, as there is a growing literature showing diverse perceptual differences across cultures.
3. What were your findings?
Western Caucasians use an analytical strategy to extract information from faces (i.e. fixations over one eye, the other eye and the mouth). Contrary to intuition, East Asians focus more on the central region of faces (i.e. nose) to extract information in an holistic, global fashion. Interestingly, this contrast in eye movement strategies might originate from difference in the structure of Western and Eastern societies. Western societies are
-individualistic- and observers analytically fixated to individual face features. Eastern societies are -collectivistic- and observers fixated globally to all the face features.
4. You divide subjects culturally in terms of Westerners and East Asians. How did their reactions differ? How were they similar?
Observers from both cultures had similar (and no particular) reactions and their performance was comparable. The latter point is important, as both eye movement strategies were as effective to process faces.
5. Would you expect similar results from first generation Asians living in the West and vice versa?
We are currently investigating this hypothesis. The results we have collected so far indicates that British born Chinese possess eye movement strategies to explore faces that are more Westerner-like than Easterner-like. This pattern of result suggests that the differences we found in our study are related to genuine social experience.
6. Would you expect further differentiation in reactions within Western subgroups, e.g. Africans in the UK vs. Asians in the UK, Caucasian-Americans vs Latin-Americans?
This is a good question... an empirical question. I would say that the societies in which those population live would determine their eye movement strategies. However, I repeat, this is an empirical question that would need to be properly investigated.
7. Did your results fulfill the expectations of the study? Were there any surprises?
We were surprised to observe that observers of both cultures did not change their viewing strategies as a function of the race of the faces. Indeed, we thought that the well-known impairment in recognizing other-race faces (Caucasians have difficulties recognizing East Asian faces and vice-versa; the so-called: other-race effect) was rooted in inappropriate eye movement strategies. But this was not the case. Observers did not change perceptual strategies as a function of the race of the faces they were viewing, which highlights the robustness of the perceptual mechanisms engaged during face processing.
8. Can you place your findings within the context of face recognitions studies, in general?
We have demonstrated that face recognition can be effectively achieved in different ways. In general, I found that it is fascinating to think that human beings might not perceive the world in the same way, as a function of the cultural experience they are confronted with.
(Reporting by Marc Landas)
