On the facilitative effects of face motion on face recognition and its development

For the past century, researchers have extensively studied human face processing and its development. These studies have advanced our understanding of not only face processing, but also visual processing in general. However, most of what we know about face processing was investigated using static face images as stimuli. Therefore, an important question arises: to what extent does our understanding of static face processing generalize to face processing in real-life contexts in which faces are mostly moving? The present article addresses this question by examining recent studies on moving face processing to uncover the influence of facial movements on face processing and its development. First, we describe evidence on the facilitative effects of facial movements on face recognition and two related theoretical hypotheses: the supplementary information hypothesis and the representation enhancement hypothesis. We then highlight several recent studies suggesting that facial movements optimize face processing by activating specific face processing strategies that accommodate to task requirements. Lastly, we review the influence of facial movements on the development of face processing in the first year of life. We focus on infants' sensitivity to facial movements and explore the facilitative effects of facial movements on infants' face recognition performance. We conclude by outlining several future directions to investigate moving face processing and emphasize the importance of including dynamic aspects of facial information to further understand face processing in real-life contexts.

[1]  L. Bahrick,et al.  Infant discrimination of faces in naturalistic events: actions are more salient than faces. , 2008, Developmental psychology.

[2]  L. Jakobson,et al.  A sex difference in interference between identity and expression judgments with static but not dynamic faces. , 2013, Journal of vision.

[3]  V. Bruce,et al.  Face Recognition in Poor-Quality Video: Evidence From Security Surveillance , 1999 .

[4]  Arlette Streri,et al.  The role of motion and speech in face recognition at birth , 2011 .

[5]  V. Bruce,et al.  Repetition priming from moving faces , 2004, Memory & cognition.

[6]  E. Turiel.  The Development of Morality , 2007 .

[7]  D. Kadasne.  Development of Face , 2011 .

[8]  Bruno Rossion,et al.  Holistic Processing Is Finely Tuned for Faces of One's Own Race , 2006, Psychological science.

[9]  Leslie B. Cohen,et al.  Uses and misuses of habituation and related preference paradigms , 2004 .

[10]  S. Hunnius,et al.  Developmental Changes in Visual Scanning of Dynamic Faces and Abstract Stimuli in Infants: A Longitudinal Study. , 2004, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[11]  Michael G. Strintzis,et al.  Face Recognition , 2008, Encyclopedia of Multimedia.

[12]  Scott P. Johnson,et al.  Biracial and monoracial infant own-race face perception: an eye tracking study. , 2012, Developmental science.

[13]  A. Streri,et al.  Recognition of unfamiliar talking faces at birth , 2011 .

[14]  Vicki Bruce,et al.  Evaluating the effectiveness of pixelation and blurring on masking the identity of familiar faces , 2001 .

[15]  D. Maurer,et al.  The many faces of configural processing , 2002, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[16]  W. Hayward,et al.  Face inversion disproportionately disrupts sensitivity to vertical over horizontal changes in eye position. , 2012, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[17]  O. Pascalis,et al.  Is Face Processing Species-Specific During the First Year of Life? , 2002, Science.

[18]  C. Nelson.  The Development and Neural Bases of Face Recognition , 2001 .

[19]  D. Berry.  What can a moving face tell us? , 1990, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[20]  Alan Slater,et al.  Development of Face-Processing Ability in Childhood , 2013 .

[21]  D. Papineau,et al.  Nature and nurture. , 1982, Journal of medical ethics.

[22]  Sarah E. MacPherson,et al.  Familiar Other-Race Faces Show Normal Holistic Processing and are Robust to Perceptual Stress , 2007, Perception.

[23]  H. Bülthoff,et al.  A search advantage for faces learned in motion , 2006, Experimental Brain Research.

[24]  P Bakan,et al.  Visual asymmetry in perception of faces. , 1973, Neuropsychologia.

[25]  Alice J. O'Toole,et al.  Memory for Moving Faces: The Interplay of Two Recognition Systems , 2010 .

[26]  Daniel D. Dilks,et al.  Differential selectivity for dynamic versus static information in face-selective cortical regions , 2011, NeuroImage.

[27]  Saul I. Gass,et al.  The Many Faces of OR , 1991 .

[28]  A. Johnston,et al.  Categorizing sex and identity from the biological motion of faces , 2001, Current Biology.

[29]  G. Winocur,et al.  What Is Special about Face Recognition? Nineteen Experiments on a Person with Visual Object Agnosia and Dyslexia but Normal Face Recognition , 1997, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[30]  D. Lewkowicz,et al.  Infants deploy selective attention to the mouth of a talking face when learning speech , 2012, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[31]  P. Zelazo.  The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Psychology , 2013 .

[32]  D. Maurer,et al.  Infants' perception of natural and distorted arrangements of a schematic face. , 1981, Child development.

[33]  D. Maurer,et al.  Impairment in Holistic Face Processing Following Early Visual Deprivation , 2004, Psychological science.

[34]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Developing a brain specialized for face perception: a converging methods approach. , 2002, Developmental psychobiology.

[35]  E. W. Ames,et al.  A multifactor model of infant preferences for novel and familiar stimuli. , 1988 .

[36]  V. Bruce,et al.  The role of dynamic information in the recognition of unfamiliar faces , 1998, Memory & cognition.

[37]  O. Pascalis,et al.  Own- and other-race face scanning in infants: implications for perceptual narrowing. , 2014, Developmental psychobiology.

[38]  A. Anastasi.  Individual differences. , 2020, Annual review of psychology.

[39]  Hui Fang,et al.  The effect of motion at encoding and retrieval for same- and other-race face recognition. , 2011, British journal of psychology.

[40]  David Whitney,et al.  Holistic crowding of Mooney faces. , 2009, Journal of vision.

[41]  Hervé Abdi,et al.  Recognition of moving and static faces by young infants. , 2009, Child development.

[42]  V. M. Cassia,et al.  Early Experience Predicts Later Plasticity for Face Processing , 2009, Psychological science.

[43]  Sarah Bate,et al.  Face Recognition and its Disorders , 2012 .

[44]  P. Quinn,et al.  Adults Scan Own- and Other-Race Faces Differently , 2012, PloS one.

[45]  Vicki Bruce,et al.  Recognizing Famous Faces: Exploring the Benefits of Facial Motion , 2000 .

[46]  E. McKone,et al.  Importance of the Inverted Control in Measuring Holistic Face Processing with the Composite Effect and Part-Whole Effect , 2013, Front. Psychology.

[47]  R. L. Fantz.  Visual Experience in Infants: Decreased Attention to Familiar Patterns Relative to Novel Ones , 1964, Science.

[48]  E. Spelke,et al.  Infant perception of object unity from translatory motion in depth and vertical translation. , 1986, Child development.

[49]  Leslie B. Cohen,et al.  Beyond U-Shaped Development in Infants' Processing of Faces: An Information-Processing Account , 2004 .

[50]  G. Johansson.  Visual perception of biological motion and a model for its analysis , 1973 .

[51]  E. McKone,et al.  Configural processing and face viewpoint. , 2008, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[52]  Galia Avidan,et al.  Impaired holistic processing in congenital prosopagnosia , 2011, Neuropsychologia.

[53]  V. Goffaux.  The discriminability of local cues determines the strength of holistic face processing , 2012, Vision Research.

[54]  Lorna S. Jakobson,et al.  How Dynamic Facial Cues, Stimulus Orientation and Processing Biases Influence Identity and Expression Interference , 2013 .

[55]  O. Pascalis,et al.  Three-month-olds, but not newborns, prefer own-race faces. , 2005, Developmental science.

[56]  Karen Lander,et al.  Exploring the Role of Motion in Prosopagnosia: Recognizing, Learning and Matching Faces , 2004, Neurocase.

[57]  J. N. Bassili.  Facial motion in the perception of faces and of emotional expression. , 1978, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[58]  O. Pascalis,et al.  Development of the other-race effect during infancy: evidence toward universality? , 2009, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[59]  Scott P. Johnson,et al.  Perception of object unity in young infants: The roles of motion, depth, and orientation , 1996 .

[60]  K. Lander,et al.  Recognizing Face Identity from Natural and Morphed Smiles , 2006, Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[61]  H. Bülthoff,et al.  Effects of temporal association on recognition memory , 2001, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[62]  B. Spehar,et al.  Perception of Mooney faces by young infants: the role of local feature visibility, contrast polarity, and motion. , 2012, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[63]  P. Quinn,et al.  Similarity and difference in the processing of same- and other-race faces as revealed by eye tracking in 4- to 9-month-olds. , 2011, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[64]  R. Bhatt,et al.  Face processing in infancy: developmental changes in the use of different kinds of relational information. , 2005, Child development.

[65]  Vicki Bruce,et al.  The role of motion in learning new faces , 2003 .

[66]  C. M. Mooney.  Age in the development of closure ability in children. , 1957, Canadian journal of psychology.

[67]  Dwight J. Peterson,et al.  The effects of varying configuration in the composite task support an attentional account of holistic processing , 2013 .

[68]  Julianne H. Ayyad,et al.  Recognizing people from dynamic and static faces and bodies: Dissecting identity with a fusion approach , 2010, Vision Research.

[69]  Cindy M. Bukach,et al.  Holistic processing as a hallmark of perceptual expertise for nonface categories including Chinese characters. , 2012, Journal of vision.

[70]  R. Lickliter,et al.  The development of face perception in infancy: intersensory interference and unimodal visual facilitation. , 2013, Developmental psychology.

[71]  Isabel Gauthier,et al.  Perceptual Expertise as a Shift From Strategic Interference to Automatic Holistic Processing , 2011, Current directions in psychological science.

[72]  Z. Kourtzi,et al.  A Matching Advantage for Dynamic Human Faces , 2002, Perception.

[73]  G. Pike,et al.  Recognizing moving faces: The relative contribution of motion and perspective view information. , 1997 .

[74]  Heinrich H. Bülthoff,et al.  Learning influences the encoding of static and dynamic faces and their recognition across different spatial frequencies , 2009 .

[75]  James W Tanaka,et al.  Does face inversion qualitatively change face processing: an eye movement study using a face change detection task. , 2013, Journal of vision.

[76]  Witold Pedrycz,et al.  Face recognition: A study in information fusion using fuzzy integral , 2005, Pattern Recognit. Lett..

[77]  M. Kleiner,et al.  Recognition of emotion in moving and static composite faces , 2006 .

[78]  L. Hogben.  NATURE AND NURTURE , 1934 .

[79]  Mark H. Johnson,et al.  Oxford Handbook of Face Perception , 2011 .

[80]  J. Haxby,et al.  The distributed human neural system for face perception , 2000, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[81]  D. I. Perrett,et al.  Are the perceptual biases found in chimeric face processing reflected in eye-movement patterns? , 2005, Neuropsychologia.

[82]  O. Pascalis,et al.  The Other-Race Effect Develops During Infancy , 2007, Psychological science.

[83]  L. Gogate,et al.  Attention and memory for faces and actions in infancy: the salience of actions over faces in dynamic events. , 2002, Child development.

[84]  N. Kanwisher,et al.  Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews Face Identity Recognition in Autism Spectrum Disorders: a Review of Behavioral Studies , 2022 .

[85]  M. Goodale,et al.  Interactions between the processing of gaze direction and facial expression , 2005, Vision Research.

[86]  Scott P. Johnson,et al.  Perception of object unity in 2-month-old infants. , 1995 .

[87]  H. Ichikawa,et al.  The movement of internal facial features elicits 7 to 8-month-old infants' preference for face patterns , 2011 .

[88]  L. Rosenblum,et al.  Visual speech information for face recognition , 2002, Perception & psychophysics.

[89]  Christopher J. Fox,et al.  Defining the face processing network: Optimization of the functional localizer in fMRI , 2009, Human brain mapping.

[90]  O. Pascalis,et al.  Caucasian Infants Scan Own- and Other-Race Faces Differently , 2011, PloS one.

[91]  David K. A. Barnes,et al.  correction: Early visual experience and face processing , 2001, Nature.

[92]  P. Quinn,et al.  Facial motion facilitates featural, not holistic, processing in children, adolescents, and adults , 2013 .

[93]  Jeremy J. Tree,et al.  Motion as a cue to face recognition: Evidence from congenital prosopagnosia , 2013, Neuropsychologia.

[94]  Gabriel Arnold,et al.  Timing constraints of temporal view association in face recognition , 2012, Vision Research.

[95]  H. Bülthoff,et al.  What the Human Brain Likes About Facial Motion , 2012, Cerebral cortex.

[96]  Hermann Bulf,et al.  The role of rigid motion in newborns' face recognition , 2010 .

[97]  I. Thornton,et al.  Motion can amplify the face-inversion effect , 2011 .

[98]  V. Bruce,et al.  Matching identities of familiar and unfamiliar faces caught on CCTV images. , 2001, Journal of experimental psychology. Applied.

[99]  James W. Tanaka,et al.  Face recognition in young children : When the whole is greater than the sum of its parts , 1998 .

[100]  A. Young,et al.  Configurational Information in Face Perception , 1987, Perception.

[101]  G. Schwarzer,et al.  Evidence of a shift from featural to configural face processing in infancy. , 2007, Developmental science.

[102]  Hervé Abdi,et al.  Learning the Moves: The Effect of Familiarity and Facial Motion on Person Recognition across Large Changes in Viewing Format , 2006, Perception.

[103]  A. O'Toole,et al.  Recognizing moving faces: a psychological and neural synthesis , 2002, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[104]  S. Schweinberger,et al.  Asymmetric relationships among perceptions of facial identity, emotion, and facial speech. , 1998, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[105]  C. Nelson,et al.  Featural and Configural Face Processing in Adults and Infants: A Behavioral and Electrophysiological Investigation , 2006, Perception.

[106]  Jeremy Wilmer,et al.  Using regression to measure holistic face processing reveals a strong link with face recognition ability , 2013, Cognition.

[107]  M. Harvey,et al.  Perceptual biases in chimeric face processing: Eye-movement patterns cannot explain it all , 2006, Brain Research.

[108]  M. Farah,et al.  Parts and Wholes in Face Recognition , 1993, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[109]  V. Bruce,et al.  The role of movement in the recognition of famous faces , 1999, Memory & cognition.

[110]  Isabel Gauthier,et al.  Holistic processing of faces: perceptual and decisional components. , 2008, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[111]  So Kanazawa,et al.  Infant brain activity while viewing facial movement of point-light displays as measured by near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) , 2010, Neuroscience Letters.

[112]  R. Caldara,et al.  Putting Culture Under the ‘Spotlight’ Reveals Universal Information Use for Face Recognition , 2010, PloS one.

[113]  Graham J Hole,et al.  I can't recognize your face but I can recognize its movement , 2007, Cognitive neuropsychology.

[114]  D. Maurer,et al.  Neuroperception: Early visual experience and face processing , 2001, Nature.

[115]  Daniel Mills,et al.  Left gaze bias in humans, rhesus monkeys and domestic dogs , 2009, Animal Cognition.

[116]  A. Johnston,et al.  The Role of Movement in Face Recognition , 1997 .

[117]  Y. Bar-Haim,et al.  Nature and Nurture in Own-Race Face Processing , 2006, Psychological science.

[118]  Alan Johnston,et al.  Infants' Discrimination of Faces by Using Biological Motion Cues , 2006, Perception.

[119]  H. Bülthoff,et al.  The use of facial motion and facial form during the processing of identity , 2003, Vision Research.

[120]  Naiqi G Xiao,et al.  Elastic facial movement influences part-based but not holistic processing. , 2013, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[121]  A. O'Toole,et al.  Psychological and neural perspectives on the role of motion in face recognition. , 2003, Behavioral and cognitive neuroscience reviews.

[122]  K. Lander,et al.  Exploring the role of characteristic motion when learning new faces , 2007, Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[123]  R. Yin.  Looking at Upside-down Faces , 1969 .

[124]  Bruno Rossion,et al.  Extensive visual training in adulthood significantly reduces the face inversion effect. , 2012, Journal of vision.

[125]  O. Pascalis,et al.  Plasticity of face processing in infancy. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[126]  Ruosi Wang,et al.  Individual Differences in Holistic Processing Predict Face Recognition Ability , 2012, Psychological science.

[127]  J. Schultz,et al.  Natural facial motion enhances cortical responses to faces , 2009, Experimental Brain Research.

[128]  K. Durand,et al.  Qualitative differences in the exploration of upright and upside-down faces in four-month-old infants: an eye-movement study. , 2006, Child development.

[129]  Isabel Gauthier,et al.  Holistic Processing Predicts Face Recognition , 2011, Psychological science.

[130]  Paul C. Quinn,et al.  Rigid facial motion influences featural, but not holistic, face processing , 2012, Vision Research.