Unconscious Processing Characteristics Of The Face Recognition Research

Information transmitted by face play an important role in man's social life. Not only can the study on face recognition help us understand the basic characteristic and the law of face processing in nature, and explain many phenomenon concerned with face recognition, but also is contributed to understand the pattern and law of human visual process. At present, face recognition has aroused interest of many investigators, and becoming an important field of study.Existing explicit processing study of face recognition has approved that it has different specific effect with object recognition, such as face inversion effect, expression effect, gender effect and familiarity effect. However, in real life, people usually don't have pure conscious process on face recognition, and further are implicit. So depend on explicit research methods solely is difficult to clarify the complicated processing mechanism in face recognition. Therefore, use unconscious processing to investigate the characteristics of the cognition processing of face recognition has important theoretical and practical significance.This study used stars and strangers as experiment materials, and undergraduate students as subject, explored the unconscious process in face recognition. It included four experiment series.Experiment 1 used the stimulus rapidly flash and selective attention paradigms, setted low cognitive load condition (color judgment of character string) and high cognitive load condition (target search of character string) to investigate the effects of cognitive load on the duration of unconscious process in face recognition, and examined the priming effect of unconscious process of face recognition on name and the priming effect of name on unconscious process of face recognition. Experiment 2 used mask paradigm, examined the priming effect in implicit semantic matching task and explicit face feature matching task under two SOA conditions.Experiment 3 and experiment 4 used repetition priming paradigm, examined the repeated priming effect of the upright and convert faces of stars, familiar classmates and strangers by manipulating the time interval of the repeat presentation of faces.Colligate the results of the four experiments and related discussion, this study sustains the conclusions as follow:1. The unconscious perception of face had priming effect on name recognition, but name didn't have such effect on the familiarity of face recognition. Cognitive load didn't have effect on the effect of unconscious process of the faces of stars. The unconscious process of face had long memory time effect. 2. There were repetition priming effects in both explicit face matching task and implicit semantic clarify task. The magnitude of priming were influenced by both the masks and SOA.In the implicit task, SOA only had regulatory role in the priming magnitude when there is no mask. The mask didn't interdict the semantic information of the faces, the implicit processing of face recognition depended on the knowledge in mind more, and there existed conceptually-driven effect. In the explicit task, SOA only had regulatory role in the priming magnitude of faces that appeared repeatedly. The mask interdicted the perceptual information of the faces, which affected the achievement of direct feature matching task.3. There were perceptual priming and conceptual priming of the repetition priming of familiar faces, but only perceptual priming of unfamiliar faces. The association of perceptual priming and conceptual priming can facilitation the face recognition process. The conceptual priming effect was bigger than perceptual priming effect.