The Rotated Self-face Recognition And Its Cognitive Mechanism

Face recognition is an important function in the social life, and it makes us have a correct understanding about the emotional state, social status, gender, age and ethnicity, which is helpful to people’s social interaction and environmental adaptation. Self-face recognition is an important part of face recognition, the study shows that the self- face advantage will be affected by many factors, so the mental rotation angle. In Experiment 1 we use the same-different judgment paradigm to investigate whether selfface advantage is regulated by plane rotation angle. Subjects are required to judge whether the second face presented(rotated a certain angle: 12 orientations in 30 ° steps from upright up to 330°in a clockwise direction) is same with the first face presented, and reaction time and correct rate are recorded. It found that participants recognized the reaction of self rotating face and other rotated faces are in line with the change rules of the mental rotation, with the deviating the upright angle increases, reaction time becomes longer and rotated to 180 reaction when the longest. More important is, when faces in the plane rotation to 0-120, 240- 330 degrees, respond to self face recognition significantly was faster than to faces of others; when the face in the plane rotation to 150 degrees—210 degrees, there was no significant difference between two types of faces. Experimental 2, 3 and 4 were used the same way to verify why self-face in 150 to 210 degrees the advantage disappeared, whether for the reason that face feature information damaged(Experiment 2); or second order structural information damaged(Experiment 3). Or the destruction of the feature information of the faces and the second order configural information(Experiment 4). To explore its mechanism, the results showed that, when the feature information of the face and the second-order configural information are destroyed, the self-face recognition advantage is lost. Thus, self-face advantage will be affected by the angle of rotation and self-face advantage will disappear, for the reason that rotation angles damaged self-face feature information and structural information.