Subjective self-assessment of face recognition ability is only weakly related to objective measures of face recognition performance

Previous research has established a possible link between recognition performance, individuation experience, and implicit racial bias of other-race faces. However, it remains unclear how implicit racial bias might influence other-race face processing in observers with relatively extensive experience with the other race. Here we examined how recognition of other-race faces might be modulated by observers’ implicit racial bias, in addition to the effects of experience and face recognition ability. Caucasian participants in a culturally diverse city completed a memory task for Asian and Caucasian faces, an implicit association test, an experience questionnaire towards Asians and Caucasians, and a face recognition ability test. Overall, participants showed significantly better recognition performance for other- than own-race faces. More importantly, recognition performance for other-race faces was positively predicted by increased face recognition ability, experience with Asians, and negatively predicted by increased positive bias towards Asians, which was modulated by an interaction between face recognition ability and implicit bias, with the effect of implicit bias observed predominantly in observers with high face recognition ability. Moreover, significant differences were observed among the positions of the first two fixations when participants learned the other-race faces, with the first fixation modulated by the effect of experience and the second fixation modulated by the interaction between implicit bias and face recognition ability. Taken together, these findings suggest the complexity in understanding the perceptual and socio-cognitive influences on the other-race effect, and that observers with high face recognition ability may more likely evaluate racial features involuntarily when recognizing other-race faces.

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Associations between self-reported and actual face recognition abilities are only evident in above- and below-average recognisers

10.31234/osf.io/74w6h ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Alejandro Estudillo ◽

Wong Hoo Keat

Keyword(s):

Face Recognition ◽

Individual Differences ◽

Recognition Performance ◽

Negative Association ◽

Memory Test ◽

Self Report ◽

Recognition Ability ◽

General Studies ◽

Typical Range ◽

Report Measure

The 20-Item Prosopagnosia Items (PI-20) was recently introduced as a self-report measure of face recognition abilities and as an instrument to help the diagnosis of prosopagnosia. In general, studies using this questionnaire have shown that observers have moderate to strong insights into their face recognition abilities. However, it remains unknown whether these insights are equivalent for the whole range of face recognition abilities. The present study investigates this issue using the Mandarin version of the PI-20 and the Cambridge Face Memory Test Chinese (CFMT-Chinese). Our results showed a moderate negative association between the PI-20 and the CFMT-Chinese. However, this association was driven by people with low and high face recognition ability, but absent in people within the typical range of face recognition performance. The implications of these results for the study of individual differences and the diagnosis of prosopagnosia are discussed.

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The Twenty Item Prosopagnosia Index (PI20) provides meaningful evidence of face recognition impairment

Royal Society Open Science ◽

10.1098/rsos.202062 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (11) ◽

Author(s):

Maria Tsantani ◽

Tim Vestner ◽

Richard Cook

Keyword(s):

Face Recognition ◽

Recognition Accuracy ◽

Self Report ◽

Objective Measures ◽

Recognition Ability ◽

Considerable Debate ◽

Computer Based ◽

Typical Range ◽

Insight Into ◽

Intended Use

The Twenty Item Prosopagnosia Index (PI20) is a self-report questionnaire used for quantifying prosopagnosic traits. This scale is intended to help researchers identify cases of developmental prosopagnosia by providing standardized self-report evidence to complement diagnostic evidence obtained from objective computer-based tasks. In order to respond appropriately to items, prosopagnosics must have some insight that their face recognition is well below average, while non-prosopagnosics need to understand that their relative face recognition ability falls within the typical range. There has been considerable debate about whether participants have the necessary insight into their face recognition abilities to respond appropriately. In the present study, we sought to determine whether the PI20 provides meaningful evidence of face recognition impairment. In keeping with the intended use of the instrument, we used PI20 scores to identify two groups: high-PI20 scorers (those with self-reported face recognition difficulties) and low-PI20 scorers (those with no self-reported face recognition difficulties). We found that participant groups distinguished on the basis of PI20 scores clearly differed in terms of their mean performance on objective measures of face recognition ability. We also found that high-PI20 scorers were more likely to achieve levels of face recognition accuracy associated with developmental prosopagnosia.

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Associations between self-reported and objective face recognition abilities are only evident in above- and below-average recognisers

PeerJ ◽

10.7717/peerj.10629 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 ◽

pp. e10629

Author(s):

Alejandro J. Estudillo ◽

Hoo Keat Wong

Keyword(s):

Face Recognition ◽

Individual Differences ◽

Recognition Performance ◽

Negative Association ◽

Memory Test ◽

Self Report ◽

Recognition Ability ◽

General Studies ◽

Typical Range ◽

Report Measure

The 20-Item Prosopagnosia Items (PI-20) was recently introduced as a self-report measure of face recognition abilities and as an instrument to help the diagnosis of prosopagnosia. In general, studies using this questionnaire have shown that observers have moderate to strong insights into their face recognition abilities. However, it remains unknown whether these insights are equivalent for the whole range of face recognition abilities. The present study investigates this issue using the Mandarin version of the PI-20 and the Cambridge Face Memory Test Chinese (CFMT-Chinese). Our results showed a moderate negative association between the PI-20 and the CFMT-Chinese. However, this association was driven by people with low and high face recognition ability, but absent in people within the typical range of face recognition performance. The implications of these results for the study of individual differences and the diagnosis of prosopagnosia are discussed.

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Savings in Relearning Face—Name Associations as Evidence for “Covert Recognition” in Prosopagnosia

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn.1992.4.2.150 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 4 (2) ◽

pp. 150-154 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Marcie A. Wallace ◽

Martha J. Farah

Keyword(s):

Face Recognition ◽

Brain Damage ◽

Recognition Performance ◽

Normal Subjects ◽

Conscious Awareness ◽

Recognition Ability ◽

The Face ◽

Per Se

Prosopagnosic patients appear to be impaired at recognizing faces. However, recent evidence for “covert recognition” in prosopagnosia has been taken to suggest that the impairment is not in face recognition per se, but rather in conscious access to face recognition. The most widely used test for covert recognition of faces in prosopagnosia is the face-name relearning task, in which some prosopagnosics have been found to learn correct names for previously familiar faces more easily than incorrect names. Although this phenomenon is consistent with face recognition operating normally but out of reach of conscious awareness, it may also be consistent with an impairment in face recognition per se. Perhaps savings in relearning is sufficiently sensitive to the residual information contained in degraded face representations that are not detectable by overt measures of recognition. If so, then we should expect to observe this same savings in relearning when overt recognition is obliterated for reasons other than brain damage. In the present study, we used forgetting of face-name associations in normal subjects as a way of degrading recognition ability. We found the same dissociation between overt recognition performance and savings in relearning as observed in prosopagnosic patients. This implies that the performance of prosopagnosic patients in these tasks does not demand explanation in terms other than an impairment in face recognition per se.

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The effect of implicit racial bias on recognition of other-race faces

Cognitive Research Principles and Implications ◽

10.1186/s41235-021-00337-7 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Tobiasz Trawiński ◽

Araz Aslanian ◽

Olivia S. Cheung

Keyword(s):

Face Recognition ◽

Racial Bias ◽

Recognition Performance ◽

Implicit Bias ◽

Memory Task ◽

The Other ◽

Extensive Experience ◽

Ability Test ◽

Implicit Racial Bias ◽

Recognition Ability

AbstractPrevious research has established a possible link between recognition performance, individuation experience, and implicit racial bias of other-race faces. However, it remains unclear how implicit racial bias might influence other-race face processing in observers with relatively extensive experience with the other race. Here we examined how recognition of other-race faces might be modulated by observers’ implicit racial bias, in addition to the effects of experience and face recognition ability. Caucasian participants in a culturally diverse city completed a memory task for Asian and Caucasian faces, an implicit association test, a questionnaire assessing experience with Asians and Caucasians, and a face recognition ability test. As expected, recognition performance for Asian faces was positively predicted by increased face recognition ability, and experience with Asians. More importantly, it was also negatively predicted by increased positive bias towards Asians, which was modulated by an interaction between face recognition ability and implicit bias, with the effect of implicit bias observed predominantly in observers with high face recognition ability. Moreover, the positions of the first two fixations when participants learned the other-race faces were affected by different factors, with the first fixation modulated by the effect of experience and the second fixation modulated by the interaction between implicit bias and face recognition ability. Taken together, these findings suggest the complexity in understanding the perceptual and socio-cognitive influences on the other-race effect, and that observers with high face recognition ability may more likely evaluate racial features involuntarily when recognizing other-race faces.

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Intrinsic equivalence between developmental prosopagnosia questionnaires

10.1101/267351 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Daisuke Matsuyoshi ◽

Katsumi Watanabe

Keyword(s):

Face Recognition ◽

High Reliability ◽

Recognition Performance ◽

Large Population ◽

Principal Component ◽

Cost Effective ◽

Self Report ◽

Effective Measure ◽

Recognition Ability ◽

Relationship Of

AbstractThe 20-item prosopagnosia index (PI20) is a self-report measure of face recognition ability, which is aimed to assess the risk for developmental prosopagnosia (DP), developed by Shah, Gaule, Sowden, Bird, and Cook (2015). Although they validated PI20 in several ways and it may serve as a quick and cost-effective measure for estimating DP risk (Livingston & Shah, in press; Shah et al., 2015), they did not formally evaluate its validity against a pre-existing alternative questionnaire (Kennerknecht et al., 2008) even though they criticized the weak relationship of the pre-existing questionnaire to actual behavioral face recognition performance. Thus, we administered the questionnaires to a large population (N = 855) and found a very strong correlation (r = 0.82 [95% confidence interval: 0.80, 0.84]), a principal component that accounted for more than 90% of the variance, and comparable reliability between the questionnaires. These results show unidimensionality and equivalence between the two questionnaires, or at least, a very strong common latent factor underlying them. The PI20 may not be greater than the pre-existing questionnaire; the two questionnaires measured essentially the same trait. The intrinsic equivalence between the questionnaires necessitates a revision of the view that the PI20 overcomes the weakness of the pre-existing questionnaire. Because both questionnaires contained unreliable items, we suggest, instead of using either questionnaire alone, that selection of a set of items with high reliability may offer a more robust approach to capture face recognition ability.

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