Low-frequency Spatial Frequency Information In Face Recognition, Familiarity To Judge The Impact

Studies have demonstrated that recognized familiar faces will be better than unfamiliar face when the face pictures presented with poor quality, which considers to be the reason that familiar face recognition depends on configuration processing (Bruce, Henderson, Newman & Burton, 2001). The studies of spatial frequencies on face recognition have shown that the formation of configuration information depends on the low spatial frequency information (Goffaux, Hault, Michel, Vuongo & Rosssion,2005). We can deduce that low spatial frequency information may play an important role in the familiar decision task. In order to test this inference, we designed three experiments. The first and the second one designed to examine whether the low spatial frequency information was a vital information in the familiar decision task, and the third experiment used ERPs to study the process of low spatial frequency information affecting the face familiar decision.The first experiment examined the role of low spatial frequency information in affecting face familiar decision under the exposed of poor quality pictures. We first presented a series of front face pictures with full spatial frequency to ask participants to learn, including half of familiar faces and half of unfamiliar faces. And then, we required participants to take part in the recognition test. During the testing process, we manipulated the image spatial frequency and used four indicators including the sensitivity index d', the report standard C, the right index Pr and the probability of identified as old items despite the uncertain Br. A Repeated-Measure ANOVA was used to explore the low spatial frequency information how to impact the judge of face familiarity.The second experiment designed to study how low spatial frequency information influenced the familiar decision under the exposed of highly quality pictures. First, we showed participants a series of front face pictures with low frequency information to learn, then asked them to recognize. Experiment materials, procedures and the detection indicators were consistent with the first experiment.We adopted the familiarity decision task to examine the role of low spatial frequency information in the familiar decision task and explored the corresponding elements of ERPs. Participants were presented directly to the familiar and unfamiliar face pictures with full and low spatial frequency information. Each participant was asked to judge whether the picture was familiar or not. At the same time, we recorded the event-related brain electrical activity. The average amplitude was selected as an indicator and a repeated-measure ANOVA was used to examine how the low spatial frequency information influenced the familiar decision.The results showed that:In experiment 1 and 3, there were no significant differents between low spatial frequency and full spatial frequency pictures with the familiar face decision, while there were an interaction effect between the spatial frequency information and the familiarity in the second experiment. To be specific, the familiar decision under the Low spatial frequency made a better performance than that of full spatial frequency. Those results above supported our hypothesis that low spatial frequency information play a vital role in the familiar decision, and the familiarity effect in the truly familiar face make a better performance than that of newly familiar face which was got by learning.