Impact Of Semantic Saturation On Facial Gender Recognition

Face recognition is of great significance to people's daily lives.It allows people to accurately perceive the familiarity degree,emotional status,gender,age and race shown on the faces of other people.Thus,it essential part for people with the social communication and environmental adaptation.In face recognition,gender recognition is an essential part,which is closely related to our daily life.People can tell whether one is a “he” or “she” person in a very short time in reality and due to this common sense,many people deem that it is not necessary to make sematic processing in gender recognition.The previous researches on face recognition focus mainly on expression,attention,awareness,gender differences and other aspects but never take“linguistic” factor into account.Therefore,it is of rich theoretical and practical significance to explore whether semantic processing works in face recognition.This study attempts to examine whether the semantic saturation processing of gender-related words(male and female)would affect the face gender recognition ability.In total,two experiments have been conducted.These experiments adopt the same experimental material and make sematic saturation processing via keeping the subjects pay a long attention on words.In the first experiment,firstly Chinese characters are presented(25s),subjects perform unrelated tasks to keep the attention to the characters;after that,here come a simultaneous presentation of two faces pictures,subjects perform the matching task of recognizing the two faces pictures;In the second experiment,firstly Chinese characters are presented(25s),subjects perform unrelated tasks to keep the attention to the characters;after that,two faces pictures are presented one after another.After the presentation of the second face picture,the subjects perform the matching task of recognizing the two faces pictures.The results show that: in the first experiment,the response time of sematic saturation condition is significantly longer than that of the baseline conditions;in the second experiment,the sematic saturation conditions differs baseline conditions sharply in early-phase P1 amplitude,N170 amplitude and VPP amplitude.N170 is the unique component of face recognition,and VPP is a sensitive component of face recognition.Conclusions:In accordance with the results analysis of the first experiment,its response time of sematic saturation is significantly longer than that of the baseline conditions.Therefore,in making the judgement,the sematic concept information of the gender-related words is not needed explicitly,but the sematic ambiguity of thegender-related words that are associated with the genders of the picture will damage the face recognition ability.This result constitutes the preliminary conclusions of this study: the saturation of gender-related words can hinder face gender recognition.It suggests that in face gender recognition,related gender concept information will work actively.This inference is further supported in the second experiment,where subjects are required only to go through the identification process,and there is no need for them to make response options.On this premise,sematic saturation affects the EEG components of identification processing(which can be reflected in the amplitude of P1,N170 and VPP).This proves sematic processing plays a vital role in face gender recognition.