Showing papers by "James W. Tanaka published in 2003"
TL;DR: The findings suggest that face recognition abnormalities in autism are not fully explained by an impairment of holistic face processing, and that there is an unusual significance accorded to the mouth region when children with autism process information from people's faces.
Abstract: Background: There is substantial evidence that children with autism are impaired in face recognition. Although many researchers have suggested that this impairment derives from a failure of holistic face processing and a tendency to represent and encode faces on a part-by-part basis, this hypothesis has not been tested directly. Method: Holistic face processing was assessed by comparing children’s ability to recognize a face part (eyes, nose, or mouth) in the context of the whole face in which it was learned with their ability to recognize the same face part in isolation. Results: In Study 1, as expected, typically developing 9-year-olds (n ¼ 27) and 11-year-olds (n ¼ 30) were significantly better at recognizing face parts presented in the whole than in the part test condition, and this effect was limited to upright faces and not found for inverted faces. Consistent with prior findings, typically developing children were most accurate when face recognition depended on the eyes. In Study 2, high-functioning children with autism (n ¼ 22) evidenced a whole-test advantage for mouths only, and were markedly deficient when face recognition depended on the eyes. Their pattern of performance diverged from age- and IQ-matched comparison participants (n ¼ 20), who performed similarly to the typically developing children in Study 1. Conclusions: These findings suggest that face recognition abnormalities in autism are not fully explained by an impairment of holistic face processing, and that there is an unusual significance accorded to the mouth region when children with autism process information from people’s faces. Keywords: Autistic disorder; face perception; social cognition. Abbreviations: ADI-R: Autism Diagnostic Interview – Revised; FFA: Fusiform Face Area.
423 citations
TL;DR: The inversion effect was diminished for impossible body positions that violated the biomechanical constraints of human bodies, suggesting that human body positions, like faces, may be processed configurally by untrained viewers.
Abstract: Researchers argue that faces are recognized via the configuration of their parts. An important behavioral finding supporting this claim is the face-inversion effect, in which inversion impairs recognition of faces more than nonface objects. Until recently, faces were the only class of objects producing the inversion effect for untrained individuals. This study investigated whether the inversion effect extends to human body positions, a class of objects whose exemplars are structurally similar to each other. Three experiments compared the recognition of upright and inverted faces, houses, and body positions using a forced-choice, same/different paradigm. For both reaction time and error data, the recognition of possible human body postures was more affected by inversion than the recognition of houses. Further, the recognition of possible human body postures and recognition of faces showed similar effects of inversion. The inversion effect was diminished for impossible body positions that violated the biome...
390 citations
TL;DR: The results indicate that an own-race advantage occurs at the encoding stage of face processing.
Abstract: Studies have shown that individuals are better able to recognise the faces of people from their own race than the faces of people from other races. Although the so-called own-race effect has been generally regarded as an advantage in recognition memory, differences in the processing of the own-race versus other-race faces might also be found at the earlier stages of perceptual encoding. In this study, the perceptual basis of the own-race effect was investigated by generating a continuum of images by morphing an East Asian parent face with a Caucasian parent face. In a same/different discrimination task, East Asian and Caucasian participants judged whether the morph faces were physically identical to, or different from, their parent faces. The results revealed a significant race-of-participant by race-of-face interaction such that East Asian participants were better able to discriminate East Asian faces, whereas Caucasian participants were better able to discriminate Caucasian faces. These results indicate that an own-race advantage occurs at the encoding stage of face processing.
166 citations