Face Location in Real Backgrounds

Abstract

Five experiments are reported which tested face location in images of real scenes by humans. Observers were better at locating faces than random patches. However, inverted faces and upright and inverted kettles were also well located, suggesting that the effect was not face specific. High bandpass filtering the images did not reduce performance although low bandpass filtering did, suggesting that the sritical information for the task is at a relatively high spatial frequency. When location performance for faces and kettles was directly compared under conditions of reduced presentation time, some advantage for faces and for upright images was found. It is argued that the results do not suggest face specific detection mechanism but that the face may provide a particularly effective signal for the human visual system.