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Face facts: People don't stand out in crowds
January 22, 2008A new study reveals why it is hard to spot familiar faces in groups
Rockville, MD - Why is it difficult to pick out even a familiar face in a crowd? We all experience this, but the phenomenon has been poorly understood until now. The results of a recent study may have implications for individuals with face-recognition disorders and visual-attention related ailments - and eventually could help scientists develop an artificial visual system that approaches the sophistication of human visual perception.
The study is part of the recently completed Journal of Vision (www.journalofvision.org) special issue titled "Crowding: Including illusory conjunctions, surround suppression, and attention" (www.journalofvision.org/7/2). "Crowding" is a failure to recognize an individual object in a cluttered environment. It may be due to one of the shortcuts our brains use to help us make sense of the vast amount of visual information we take in every second.
This special issue contains 25 articles devoted exclusively to crowding and related topics. Other noteworthy studies include "Effect of letter spacing on visual span and reading speed" which links reading speed to the number of letters we can recognize without moving our eyes. The impact of contrast and character size on reading speed is examined in "The case for the visual span as a sensory bottleneck in reading."
The authors conducted five experiments to measure participants' recognition of a familiar face or house that was located in a crowded display of other faces or houses. They found that face recognition is more difficult when target faces are surrounded by upright faces (as seen in crowds). This effect was not present for images of houses, or when upside-down faces were used as targets. The results indicate that searching for a face in a crowd is difficult in part because images of upright faces interfere with each other.
This kind of crowding is well documented in simple features, such as slanted lines or edges. But faces are a complex stimulus. Many researchers believe the importance of faces in our lives lend them special status in the brain: they are processed not as a collection of these lines and edges, as many objects are, but holistically, as a single image. The authors in this study were the first to show that crowding also occurs for these high-level stimuli.
"Crowding may reveal one of the fundamental mechanisms the visual system uses to consolidate or filter a great deal of information into a very few meaningful chunks," explained Dr. Whitney. "If vision scientists and engineers are to develop an efficient and realistic artificial visual system, they will almost certainly benefit from using the human visual system as a model. An understanding of the visual system's heuristics, shortcuts and limitations - such as crowding - will likely prove essential in designing effective artificial vision."
Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
This special issue contains 25 articles devoted exclusively to crowding and related topics. Other noteworthy studies include "Effect of letter spacing on visual span and reading speed" which links reading speed to the number of letters we can recognize without moving our eyes. The impact of contrast and character size on reading speed is examined in "The case for the visual span as a sensory bottleneck in reading."
The authors conducted five experiments to measure participants' recognition of a familiar face or house that was located in a crowded display of other faces or houses. They found that face recognition is more difficult when target faces are surrounded by upright faces (as seen in crowds). This effect was not present for images of houses, or when upside-down faces were used as targets. The results indicate that searching for a face in a crowd is difficult in part because images of upright faces interfere with each other.
This kind of crowding is well documented in simple features, such as slanted lines or edges. But faces are a complex stimulus. Many researchers believe the importance of faces in our lives lend them special status in the brain: they are processed not as a collection of these lines and edges, as many objects are, but holistically, as a single image. The authors in this study were the first to show that crowding also occurs for these high-level stimuli.
"Crowding may reveal one of the fundamental mechanisms the visual system uses to consolidate or filter a great deal of information into a very few meaningful chunks," explained Dr. Whitney. "If vision scientists and engineers are to develop an efficient and realistic artificial visual system, they will almost certainly benefit from using the human visual system as a model. An understanding of the visual system's heuristics, shortcuts and limitations - such as crowding - will likely prove essential in designing effective artificial vision."
Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
Visual System Current Events and Visual System News RSSDartmouth Professor finds that iconic Oswald photo was not faked
Dartmouth Computer Scientist Hany Farid has new evidence regarding a photograph of accused John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Farid, a pioneer in the field of digital forensics, digitally analyzed an iconic image of Oswald pictured in a backyard setting holding a rifle in one hand and Marxist newspapers in the other.
Experimental treatments restore partial vision to blind people
Two experimental treatments, a retinal prosthesis and fetal tissue transplant, restored some vision to people with blinding eye diseases. The findings, presented at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news on brain science and health, may lead to new treatments for the blind.
Dyslexia varies across language barriers
Chinese-speaking children with dyslexia have a disorder that is distinctly different, and perhaps more complicated and severe, than that of English speakers.
Getting wired: how the brain does it
In a new study, researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro), McGill University have found an important mechanism involved in setting up the vast communications network of connections in the brain.
Our brain looks at eyes first to identify a face
A study by the University of Barcelona (UB) has analysed which facial features our brain examines to identify faces.
Brain detects happiness more quickly than sadness
People make value judgements about others based on their facial expressions. A new study, carried out be Spanish and Brazilian researchers, shows that - after looking at a face for only 100 milliseconds - we can detect expressions of happiness and surprise faster than those of sadness or fear.
New tool helps researchers identify DNA patterns of cancer, genetic disorders
A new tool will help researchers identify the minute changes in DNA patterns that lead to cancer, Huntington's disease and a host of other genetic disorders.
Neuroscientists discover long-term potentiation in the olfactory bulb
Ben W. Strowbridge, Ph.D, associate professor of Neuroscience and Physiology/Biophysics, and Yuan Gao, a Ph.D. student in the neurosciences program at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, are the first to discover a form of synaptic memory in the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain that processes the sense of smell.
Study reveals we seek new targets during visual search, not during other visual behaviors
When we look at a scene in front of us, we need to focus on the important items and be able to ignore distracting elements. Studies have suggested that inhibition of return (in which our attention is less likely to return to objects we've already viewed) helps make visual search more efficient - when searching a scene to find an object, we have a bias toward inspecting new regions of a scene, and we avoid looking for the object in already searched areas.
Caltech researchers train computers to analyze fruit-fly behavior
Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have trained computers to automatically analyze aggression and courtship in fruit flies, opening the way for researchers to perform large-scale, high-throughput screens for genes that control these innate behaviors.
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