Why are moving faces easier to recognize?

By Karen Lander, Lewis L. Chuang. Visual Cognition, 2005

110 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Previous work has suggested that seeing a famous face move aids the recognition of identity, especially when viewing conditions are degraded (Knight & Johnston, 1997; Lander, Christie, & Bruce, 1999). Experiment 1 investigated whether the beneficial effects of motion are related to a particular type of facial motion (expressing, talking, or rigid motion). Results showed a significant beneficial effect of both expressive and talking movements, but no advantage for rigid motion, compared with a single static image. Experiment 2 investigated whether the advantage for motion is uniform across identity. Participants rated moving famous faces for distinctiveness of motion. The famous faces (moving and static freeze frame) were then used as stimuli in a recognition task. The advantage for face motion was significant only when the motion displayed was distinctive. Results suggest that a reason why moving faces are easier to recognize is because some familiar faces have characteristic motion patterns, which act as an additional cue to identity.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/966f7f84b788a8f6547f5a15698e4881de41ce0b

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In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Citations in the corpus

Face Recognition by Humans: Nineteen Results All Computer Vision Researchers Should Know About (2006, background): “Experiments with famous (i.e., highly familiar) faces [ 42 ] again showed a facilitation in recognition with dynamic cues from expressive or talking movements, but not from rigid motion.”
Putting the pieces together: Revealing face–voice integration through the facial overshadowing effect (2017, background): “This assumption rests on demonstration that a moving face may provide a richer source of information than a static face and may thus have a greater disruptive influence on voice processing (Lander & Chuang, 2005).”