The Research On The Role Of Eyebrows In Face Recognition

As a special visual stimulus, faces bring lots of informations, such as gender, race, age, individual attractiveness, social status and emotion. People achieve communications and exchanges through face recognition to adapt to social life. Face recognition is also a basic kind of cognitive ability. As an infant, people can distinguish mother's face accurately. When growing up, people can distinguish thousands of faces. The ability of face recognition is evolved during millions of years,which plays an important role in live and multiply.In the previous researches, it is found that there are inversion effect, interracial effect and across gender effect in face recognition. Face recognition is also special in neural mechanisms, which is different from object recognition. However, which face feature plays the most important role in face recognition It is to be for further discussion. This study uses relational-local alteration paradigm and whole-part paradigm to explore the role of eyebrows in face recognition. There are two experiments in the study.There are 48 subjects in Experiment 1, devided into four groups, A, B, C and D. There are 12 subjects in each group, half of which are boys and half of which are girls. In Group A, the pictures of whole face are presented during the learning stage, and the pictures of face without eyebrows are presented during the recognition stage.In Group B, the pictures of whole face are presented during the learning stage, and the pictures of face without eyes are presented during the recognition stage. In Group C, the pictures of face without eyebrows are presented during both the learning stage and the recognition stage. In Group D, the pictures of face without eyes are presented during both the learning stage and the recognition stage. The results of the four groups are contracted. The results of the the pictures of face without eyes are better than that of the pictures of face without eyebrows. It is suggested that eyebrows affect face recognition more significantly than eyes. The results of the learning materials consistent with the recognition materials are better than that of the learning materials different from the recognition materials. It is suggested that the consistency of learning materials and recognition materials affect the recognition results significantly.There are 48 subjects in Experimen 2, devided into four groups, A, B, C and D. There are 12 subjects in each group, half of which are boys and half of which are girls. In Group A, the pictures of whole face are presented during the learning stage, subjects are required to note eyebrows only, and the pictures of eyebrows are presented during the recognition stage. In Group B, the pictures of whole face are presented during the learning stage, subjects are required to note eyes only, and the pictures of eyes are presented during the recognition stage. In Group C, the pictures of eyebrows are presented during both the learning stage and the recognition stage. In Group D, the pictures of eyes are presented during both the learning stage and the recognition stage.The results of the four groups are contracted. The results of the the pictures of eyebrows are better than that of the pictures of eyes. It is suggested that eyebrows affect face recognition more significantly than eyes. The results of the learning materials consistent with the recognition materials are better than that of the learning materials different from the recognition materials. It is suggested that the consistency of learning materials and recognition materials affect the recognition results significantly.Maybe the characteristic of eyebrows is more significant than that of eyes. The variations of eyebrows in color and shape are more than that of eyes. The eyebrows are more significant features on the forehead, which separate the forehead and eyes. People can distinguish different colors and shapes of eyebrows to identify the identifications of the faces. The stability and persistent of eyebrows are better than any other facial feature, which without artificial changes will not appear aging trait. And in the face, the eyebrows lie above the eyes. The visual system is used to processing from top to bottom in space. The eyebrows are above the eyes, so the eyebrows are processed in order, which may occupy more recognition source. As a result, the results of eyebrow recognition are better.In the process of face recognition, faces are treated as whole. In this study, when the integrity of faces is destroyed, not only the recognition of whole faces are affected, but also there are obstacles in the recognition of facial features.