Abstract
Faces are the most important social signal in our society. Nevertheless, there is a problem with faces: they are all made up of the same features in the same general order (the eyes are above the nose, which is above the mouth). To process faces one uses a special kind of processing, which is holistic, considering the integration of the face’s features and their relative distances. One may distinguish the recognition of known faces and the processing of unfamiliar faces. Face processing abilities may be lost due to either a lesion or developmental reasons, i.e., prosopagnosia. To further explore these reasons, one could consider pictorial representations of faces—such as faces in paintings. These are particularly interesting because different art styles differ in how realistic/distorted they are relative to real faces, which allows for exploring people’s sensitivity to face-likeness. In a way, individuals are not sensitive to face-likeness. In face matching part–whole tasks, performance does not differ across art styles. Still, individuals are not fully impervious to distortion: early markers of face processing (N170 component) are sensitive to face-likeness, with more realistic (vs. distorted) art styles eliciting responses more in line with those of real faces.
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Francisco Cruz
Doctoral Student
Francisco Cruz is a doctoral student in social psychology at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Lisbon, under the supervision of Prof. André Mata (University of Lisbon) and Prof. Tania Lombrozo (Princeton University). Currently, he is visiting Princeton University in research collaborator capacity. His project explores why people are sceptical of psychology as a science, as well as how to increase trust in psychological science. His research interests include lay beliefs about science (i.e., what people believe that science can or cannot explain and why), motivated beliefs in science (i.e., the contexts in which people are more prone to accepting scientific explanations), representation of social groups (i.e., how people integrate information to provide judgments on shared homogeneity vs. heterogeneity across group members), epistemic trespassing (i.e., when people provide judgments on domains beyond those in which they are experts), intuitive mind-body dualism (i.e., a natural tendency to see the world as split in material and immaterial portions), and face perception (i.e., features driving the advantage in recall for own- vs. other-race faces). He is a Student Affiliate at the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding, an Author at CogBites, and an Opinion Editor at Cruamente.