Presentation Manners And Expressions Influence Multiple Faces' Recognition

Exhibiting emotion and intention,the facial expression means a lot to individuals.But the impact from different expressions doesn't show a congruent trend in previous studies.While some confirm the positive expression superiority,others uphold the negative expression superiority.Biased competition theory holds the opinion that multiple stimulus representing in the visual cortex compete to gain processing resources in a mutually suppressive way.This competition lowers the overall processing efficiency.But when multiple stimulus are presented sequentially,the competition is reduced notably.In addition,mechanisms from top-down and bottom-up can bias competition advantage to a special stimulus,reliving it from suppressive surroundings.In this way,it could obtain sufficient processing.On the one hand,less studies zeroing in on biased competition theory choose emotional information as a variable,on the other hand,studies on multiple expressive faces often use simultaneous presentation manner and they seldom compare different presentation ways.Therefore,based on biased competition theory,this study uses three kinds of expressive faces of real persons to explore how different stimulus presentation manners and facial expressions influence face recognition.This study contained three experiments and 21 students from Ji Lin University took part in all three experiments.Experiment one was single expressive face's recognition.It found that on recognition reaction time indicator,the expression main effect was marginally significant.Subjects' recognition reaction time of happy faces was shorter than fearful faces.Experiment two was 3(happy,neutral and fearful)* 2(retrieval difficulty degree one and retrieval difficulty degree two)within subjects design.It found that on recognition accuracy indicator,the retrieval difficulty degree main effect was significant.Subjects' recognition accuracy of the degree one was higher than degree two.Experiment three was 3(happy,neutral and fearful)*2(no time interval and500 ms interval)within subjects design.It found that on recognition accuracy indicator,time interval main effect was significant.Subjects' recognition accuracy of without time interval was higher than within time interval.The interaction between expression and time interval was significant as well.Under two time interval conditions,subjects' recognition accuracy of happy faces were different significantly but not of neutral or fearful faces.The results showed that presentation manners could affect multiple faces' recognition reaction time and accuracy significantly.When adopted the sequential presentation manner,subjects' performance was enhanced notably.Secondly,positive expression superiority appeared in easy task.Its recognition reaction time was shorter and accuracy was higher than neutral and fearful faces'.Then,negative expression superiority appeared in hard task.Its recognition accuracy was higher than happy and neutral faces'.Finally,fearful faces' recognition performance was relatively stable.After the task becomes difficult,the recognition performance of fearful faces changes little.