Burke Darren, Taubert Jessica, Higman Talia
Centre for the Integrative Study of Animal Behaviour, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia.
Vision Res. 2007 Jul;47(16):2164-9. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2007.04.018. Epub 2007 Jun 18.
Almost all previous studies of face recognition have found that matching the same face depicted from different viewpoints incurs both reaction time and accuracy costs. This has been interpreted as evidence that the underlying neural representations of faces are viewpoint-specific, but such a conclusion depends on the experimental data being an accurate reflection of real-world viewpoint generalisation. An equally plausible explanation for poor viewpoint generalisation in experimental situations is that important information that is normally used to generalize across views in real-world settings is not available in the experiment. Stereoscopic information about the three-dimensional structure of the face is systematically misleading in nearly all previous investigations of face recognition, since a face depicted on a computer monitor contains explicit stereoscopic information that the face is flat. The current experiment demonstrates that viewpoint costs are reduced by depicting the face with stereoscopic three-dimensionality (compared to a synoptically presented face), raising the possibility that the viewpoint costs found in face recognition experiments might be a better reflection of the information that is typically unavailable in the experimental stimuli than of the underlying neural representation of facial identity.
几乎所有以往关于人脸识别的研究都发现，匹配从不同视角描绘的同一张脸会在反应时间和准确率方面付出代价。这被解释为面部潜在神经表征具有视角特异性的证据，但这一结论取决于实验数据能否准确反映现实世界中的视角泛化情况。对于实验情境中视角泛化不佳的一个同样合理的解释是，在现实世界场景中通常用于跨视角泛化的重要信息在实验中并不存在。在几乎所有以往的人脸识别研究中，关于面部三维结构的立体信息都会产生系统性误导，因为电脑显示器上描绘的面部包含面部是平面的明确立体信息。当前实验表明，通过以立体三维方式描绘面部（与概要呈现的面部相比），视角代价会降低，这增加了一种可能性，即人脸识别实验中发现的视角代价可能更好地反映了实验刺激中通常不存在的信息，而非面部身份的潜在神经表征。
