TALKS
2024-2025

The group addresses questions, such as what’s the difference between a posed and a spontaneous expression? how fast can we perceive a face or an emotional expression?, what strategies do radiologists employ to detect breast cancer and is this skill trainable? how do clinical conditions, such as depression, autism, affect face recognition? To address these questions, researchers in the collaborative employ a variety of empirical techniques involving psychophysics, cognitive experiments, eye tracking, neural imaging (fMRI, EEG), and computer modeling.

Catch up on the 2024-25 DMC talk season here!

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September 11th, 2024

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Speaker: Isabelle Boutet 

Title: Does semantic information influence scanning and recognition of newly learned faces and names?

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Abstract: I will start my presentation with a short review of my (unusual) academic trajectory and my research program. I will then present a study that examines the influence of person-specific semantic information on learning new faces. Background: As we become familiar with new people, we are repeatedly exposed to different perceptual images of their face which, over time, leads to storage of a perceptually invariant representation in memory (Bruce & Young, 1986; Burton, 2013, Johnston & Edmonds, 2009). During familiarisation with a new person, we also acquire semantic information about this person such as their name, occupation, preferences, etc. (Bruce & Young, 1986). Given that familiarization with new people involves both perceptual and semantic information, researchers have speculated that the presence of person-specific semantic details might affect encoding and recognition of newly learned faces. Accordingly, several studies have shown that associating faces with unique semantic information such as names or hobbies can improve their recognition (e.g., Gordon & Tanaka, 2011; Weise & Schweinberger, 2015; Schwartz & Yovel, 2016). In the present study, we examined how person-specific semantic information influences scanning, encoding and recognition of newly learned faces and names. Methods. During a Familiarization phase, participants were repeatedly exposed to a set of faces that varied in lighting across repetitions. Each face was associated with a name and half the faces were presented with a unique hobby (e.g., likes to read). This was followed by a Consolidation phase, where memory for the face-name associations was tested until participants reached a learning criterion. Finally, recognition and naming of the newly learned faces was tested immediately after the Consolidation phase, and after 1-week and 2-week delays. Faces were presented in a different viewing angle during recognition. Eye tracking technology was utilized to measure face scanning patterns throughout all phases of the experiment. Results. I will present preliminary results from the study at the DMC talk.  

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Link to Zoom recording of Isabelle's Talk

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