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The Relative Salience of Facial Features When Differentiating Faces Based on an Interference Paradigm

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Abstract

Research on face recognition and social judgment usually addresses the manipulation of facial features (eyes, nose, mouth, etc.). Using a procedure based on a Stroop-like task, Montepare and Opeyo (J Nonverbal Behav 26(1):43–59, 2002) established a hierarchy of the relative salience of cues based on facial attributes when differentiating faces. Using the same perceptual interference task, we established a hierarchy of facial features. Twenty-three participants (13 men and 10 women) volunteered for the experiment to compare pairs of frontal faces. The participants had to judge if the eyes, nose, mouth and chin in the pair of images were the same or different. The factors manipulated were the target-distractive factor (4 face components × 3 distractive factors), interference (absent vs. present) and correct answer (the same vs. different). The analysis of reaction times and errors showed that the eyes and mouth were processed before the chin and nose, thus highlighting the critical importance of the eyes and mouth, as shown by previous research.

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Notes

  1. Although the diagnostic-recognition approach takes into account task demands, the importance of task demands in face perception has also been explicitly affirmed by several researchers, including Sergent (1986, 1994), Costen et al. (1996) and McSorley and Findlay (1999).

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Acknowledgments

This project was supported in part by a grant awarded to the second author by the Directorate General for Research of the Government of Catalonia (2009SGR-1492).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychobiology and Methods for the Behavioral Sciences, University of Malaga, Campus de Teatinos, 29071, Málaga, Spain

    Marcos Ruiz-Soler

  2. Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior (IR3C), Adaptive Behavior and Interaction Research Group, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Francesc S. Beltran

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  1. Marcos Ruiz-Soler
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  2. Francesc S. Beltran
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Correspondence to Marcos Ruiz-Soler.

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Ruiz-Soler, M., Beltran, F.S. The Relative Salience of Facial Features When Differentiating Faces Based on an Interference Paradigm. J Nonverbal Behav 36, 191–203 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-012-0131-z

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