Research Areas

We explore how the brain processes faces, objects, and facial emotions.

Our research focuses on various facets of how the brain processes faces and objects. These studies use a face database of normal, disguised, and emotional faces that we collected. This allows us to study how people recognize faces that have been disguised, and what affects people’s ability to recognize emotional expressions. Thus far we have learned that people are quite poor at recognizing faces in which a disguise has been added, even if they have seen the face on numerous previous occasions. Both changing the hair and adding or subtracting glasses lead to decreases in performance. Comparisons for disguises using glasses revealed that subtracting glasses is more disruptive than adding glasses. In addition, we have found that a disguise consisting of clear lenses yields the same type of increased error rate as glasses with tinted lenses, suggesting that recognition may be affected more by obscuring the eyebrows than by the iris and sclera. Related to this, we have a set of studies that have shown that eyebrows are indeed quite important for recognizing individual faces.

We also have a set of studies looking at emotion recognition. These studies have shown that genuine expressions are more difficult to recognize than posed emotions. We have also found that being familiar with a face helps recognize the emotion, but only if it is an emotion that is very difficult to recognize. For easier to recognize emotions, familiarity may actually hinder recognition.

These studies will provide critical information for understanding our ability to recognize individuals and their emotions, an important social task for humans and other social animals.