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An Investigation into External and Internal Features for Facial Recognition

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An Investigation into External and Internal Features for Facial Recognition
An Investigation into External and Internal Features for Facial Recognition

Abstract
An experiment was conducted to see if we recognise unfamiliar faces better either with just internal features or external features. Research conducted how our human vision system recognises faces and which features we tend to pay more attention to in the first instance. Two slideshows were shown to all participants under the same experimental conditions with 32 images of faces of women for five seconds each called the encoding stage; the second slideshow consisted of the 32 images of women with just internal or external features. The experiment consisted of 15 psychology students, 4 males and 11 females ranging in age from 22 to 45. The hypothesis for this experiment was that participants will be able to identify and recognise more faces in the experiment that have external features rather than internal features, causing participants to have fewer errors for images with external features. The results supported the hypothesis as there were fewer number of errors with recognition with external features. This represents that we have a process in how we recognise faces and that the human vision system responds to external features first before internal features.

Introduction

Recognition of faces is a popular experiment which is commonly used by cognitive and clinical psychologists and is taken from perceptual psychology. It is a familiar pattern that we have a huge amount of experience in and can be the cause of discrimination and other ways that we remember different features in people all around us. The face is a multidimensional pattern which can be scanned and encoded in our minds through various types of perceptual techniques. We pay particular attention to upper face features compared with lower face features (Goldstein and Mackenberg 1966; Ellis et al 1975; McKelvie 1976; Fisher and Cox 1975; Davies et al 1977). This model has been demonstrated by a variety of

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