The visual representation of facial expression and facial identity

Lead Research Organisation: University of Bristol
Department Name: Experimental Psychology

Abstract

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Publications

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Andrew Skinner (Author) (2011) Prototype-referenced encoding of identity-dependent and identity-independent representations of facial expression in Perception

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Benton CP (2015) Deciding on race: a diffusion model analysis of race-categorisation. in Cognition

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Burton N (2013) Nine-year-old children use norm-based coding to visually represent facial expression. in Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance

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Christopher Benton (Author) (2011) The caricaturing of expression and identity - a model approach in Perception

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Skinner A (2012) Visual search for expressions and anti-expressions in Visual Cognition

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Skinner AL (2012) The expressions of strangers: our identity-independent representation of facial expression. in Journal of vision

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Skinner AL (2012) Classifying faces as faces: effects of identity and expression strength in Perception

 
Description The grant asked whether common principles apply to our representations of facial expression and facial identity. In other words, when we look at a face and perceive these attributes, what's the nature of that perception? Actually, we know quite a lot about the nature of our representation of identity, we know less about expression - so the work carried out was more about looking at expression with identity as comparison. We have good theoretical reasons to expect the two to be different - additionally, there's the simple self-evidence fact that the two are rather different beasts. We're faced with a multiplicity of facial identities that need to be learnt; in contrast, we have a limited number of facial expressions which are, to a large extent, culturally universal. So before carrying out our research, our expectation was that we would find robust differences between expression and identity. We used a variety of tasks that have been used to try to understand how we representation facial identity and created expression versions of these. We repeatedly found the same patterns of results with facial expressions that we find with facial identity. Our results therefore provide evidence that expression and identity are represented using common principles. Conversely, it is clear from other literature, that there do appear to be representational differences. A number of tasks show that identity can affect our perception of expression, yet expression seems to have little effect on our perception of identity. So the impact of the current grant is really to contribute towards our growing understanding of the representation of facial expression and its relation to facial identity. However it's clear that there's not going to be an easy answer; the final picture is likely to be complex.
Exploitation Route Our impacts have so far been scientific and we have disseminated these through the usual academic channels, these being publication in high quality journals and presentation at international conferences.
Sectors Other
URL http://www.esrc.ac.uk/my-esrc/grants/RES-000-22-4319/read