Russell Richard, Sinha Pawan
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Perception. 2007;36(9):1368-74. doi: 10.1068/p5779.
The face recognition task we perform [corrected] most often in everyday experience is the identification of people with whom we are familiar. However, because of logistical challenges, most studies focus on unfamiliar-face recognition, wherein subjects are asked to match or remember images of unfamiliar people's faces. Here we explore the importance of two facial attributes -shape and surface reflectance-in the context of a familiar-face recognition task. In our experiment, subjects were asked to recognise color images of the faces of their friends. The images were manipulated such that only reflectance or only shape information was useful for recognizing any particular face. Subjects were actually better at recognizing their friends' faces from reflectance information than from shape information. This provides evidence that reflectance information is important for face recognition in ecologically relevant contexts.
我们在日常体验中最常进行的人脸识别任务是识别我们熟悉的人。然而，由于后勤方面的挑战，大多数研究都集中在不熟悉面孔的识别上，即要求受试者匹配或记住不熟悉的人的面部图像。在这里，我们在熟悉面孔识别任务的背景下探讨两种面部属性——形状和表面反射率——的重要性。在我们的实验中，受试者被要求识别他们朋友面部的彩色图像。对图像进行了处理，使得只有反射率或只有形状信息对识别任何特定面孔有用。实际上，受试者从反射率信息中识别朋友面孔的能力比从形状信息中更好。这提供了证据，表明反射率信息在生态相关背景下对面部识别很重要。
