The Influence Of Invariant And Variable Social Processing On Face Recognition

Face identity recognition, distinguishing different persons from their faces, is vital for perceivers to adapt to different environments and interact with others in daily life.Meanwhile, in order to recognize and understand others readily and accurately in limited time and cognitive resources, social categorization is always applied to simplify social cognition, namely, categorizing others according to social information such as gender, race, age and expression. As two important parts of social cognition,whether social categorization has effect on face identity recognition is the core issue of this paper. On the review of the former relevant theories, functional face recognition theory(Bruce & Young, 1986) assures social categorization has no influence on face identity recognition; distributed human neural system for face perception(Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2000) proposed that variable social categories, such as expression, do not affect identity recognition at all; however, the invariable social categories, such as race and gender, have a profound effect on identity recognition. On the other side, dynamic theory of face perception(Quinn &Macrae, 2011) asserted both variable categories and invariable categories have impact on identity recognition. In this study, the author explored the effects of invariable categories(race category) processing and variable categories(expression category)processing on face identity recognition through three experiments. Experiment 1explored the impact of invariable social categorization(race categorization) on face identity recognition; Experiment 2 explored whether variable social categorization(expression categorization) has an influence on identity recognition; Experiment 3explored the characteristics of face identity recognition when both invariable social categorization and variable social categorization occurred. All the three experiments applied Garner’s Selective Attention Paradigm. The results are as follows, 1)invariable social categorization facilitates face identity recognition. 2) Face identity recognition is interfered from the variable social categorization. 3) The effect of invariable social categorization is much larger than the effect of variable social categorization on face identity recognition. The results demonstrate different types of social categories have different influences on identity recognition.