In the School of Psychology's new Spotlight on Research section, we focus on recent research conducted by Dr Darren Burke at our Ourimbah campus (pictured partly and wholly below!):
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When we
recognise someone, we integrate information from across their face into a
perceptual whole, and do so using a specialised brain region. Recognising other
kinds of objects does not engage such specific brain areas, and is achieved in
a much more parts-based way.
In a recent review of the literature, we (Burke
& Sulikowski, 2013) investigated how this face-specific mode of perception
may have evolved by examining the evidence for face-based holistic processing
in other species. A surprisingly wide variety of other animals can recognise
each other from their “face”, but for most of these there is either evidence
that they don’t do this “holistically” (dogs are an example) or insufficient
evidence to claim that they do (typically because the experiments are poorly
designed).
There is good evidence that some species of monkey are as affected
by turning the face upside down as humans are (which is one index of holistic
processing), and one species of monkey (Rhesus macaques) also show evidence of
the “composite effect”. The composite effect refers to the fact that people
find it difficult to recognise the top half of a face if it is shown lined up
with the bottom half of a different face, because we can’t help integrating the
two halves into a new whole. People have trouble recognising other primate
faces when they are upside down, but only
show the composite effect for human faces.
We also suggested that the original
evolutionary origin of special holistic face processing might not be to
recognise who’s who. There are actually lots of other sources of evolutionary
important information in faces that require holistic integration. For example,
detecting symmetry, and masculinity/femininity is important for mate-choice
decisions, and subtle variations in facial configurations underpin many
non-verbal communicative signals.
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For more
information about this work, please see the following journal article:
