City Research Online

Abstract

The present thesis contains three empirical studies investigating factors that influence face perception in humans. We first investigated how face representations change with familiarisation based on social trait judgements, as research shows that the way we make judgements about familiar and unfamiliar faces is distinct (Mileva et al., 2019; Kim et al., 2022), though we did not yet know about how these representations change during the process. Specifically, we measured changes in the way a set of identities was perceived based on each of these traits separately, after participants had become familiarised with them over two to three weeks by watching a television show. Chapter 3 explores how explicit social trait representations of face judgements change with familiarisation both within and between participants, as well as changes in the associations between the traits themselves. We found that representations do indeed change for some of the traits, and that representations for trustworthiness in particular become substantially similar across participants. Results also show that trait representations are significantly inter-associated, particularly post-familiarisation. Chapter 4 investigated changes in the representations of faces in the brain, also within and between participants, as well as changes in the representational similarity between the ROIs themselves. We found that representations appear to change for each of the face-selective ROIs with familiarisation, and that representations in the OFA becomes substantially more idiosyncratic across participants. We also found that the FFA and OFA remain inter-associated with familiarisation. The final empirical chapter turns its focus to individual differences in face perception and assessed the effect of person similarity on similarities in face judgements. Previous work has demonstrated that pairs of people with similar personalities also have similar brain responses to various stimuli (Matz et al., 2022). This effect could also extend to similarities in the way we perceive our social world. Other research has demonstrated that similarities in our personality and social trait dispositions appear to relate to similarities in our judgements about others and appears to generalise across the globe (Oh et al., 2022). However, there appears to be some variability by country. Thus, Chapter 5 investigates whether person similarity predicts similarities in face judgements within a specified world region (i.e., the United Kingdom). We assessed the relationship between dyadic similarities in Big 5 personality traits as well as self-reported social trait dispositions, and face judgement ratings, from all over the U.K. Results showed a significant association between the self-reports and trait judgements of other faces, unaccounted for by similarities in ethnicity, gender, age, and geographical location within the U.K. While similarities in the latter demographic dispositions also relate to similarities in face judgements, this variance is separate from that of personality and social trait dispositions. These findings may have implications for how we may gravitate towards others and form friendships, given that we may perceive our social world in similar ways. Together, findings reveal the effects of familiarisation and also our own dispositions on the way we make judgements about others’ faces, namely that representations of faces appear to change in a relatively short period as we get to know them, and that some of the variance in our perception of others can be attributed to perceptions of ourselves, and this is consistent at the dyadic level. Findings have theoretical implications for models of face perception and challenge theories of face perception in the brain.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology Q Science > QP Physiology R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry

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