Within-person variability in facial appearance

BF Psychology

Cursiter, Heather J. ; Jenkins, Rob

University:University of Glasgow

Department:School of Psychology

关键词: face recognition, face perception, face identification, face memory, within-person variability, trustworthiness, dominance, facial attractiveness;   

Others  :  http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4541/1/2013cursiterphd.pdf

来源: University of Glasgow

【 摘 要 】

Within-person variability has largely been neglected in face processing research, with research typically focusing instead on between-person variability.In experimental settings between-person variability often becomes between-image variability with research using one image to represent a face.This implies that an image is an adequate representation of a face, however one image cannot illustrate the variability that can occur in facial appearance.This thesis argues that overlooking within-person variability is a fundamental flaw in face processing research, as within-person variability is surprisingly large.The experiments in this thesis illustrate the effect of within-person variability in different face processing contexts: face identification, face perception and image memory.Experiments 1 – 7 demonstrate the difficulty of identifying familiar and unfamiliar faces across within-person variability using an image-sorting task.Experiment 8 illustrates the within-person variability that occurs in personality perception, and Experiments 9 and 10 illustrate the within-person variability that occurs in the perception of facial attractiveness.Lastly Experiments 11 and 12 introduce within-person variability to memory recognition and demonstrate the difficulties of remembering multiple images of the same face.From the results of Experiments 1 – 12 it is concluded that within-person variability is highly influential in all the discussed areas of face processing and therefore needs to be taken seriously in face processing research.