The 15th Asian Pacific Conference on Vision was held in Osaka from the 29th of July to the 1st of August. I was invited to be part to be part of the symposium Unpacking cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning the recognition and representations of unfamiliar and familiar faces and facial expressions: behavioral, eye movement and ERP studies, which was organized by Dr Kazuyo Nakabayashi (University of Hull) and brought different academics from Japan (Sakura Torii, Kobe Shoin Women’s University) the UK (Holger Wiese, Durham University) and New Zealand (Christel Devue, Victoria University of Wellington). The symposium covered some of the most important debates in face and emotion recognition.
In my case, I presented some data showing that, in contrast to what has been traditionally assumed, features have an important role in face matching tasks. Specifically, my results show that those people with a better face matching performance, tend to make more use of individual facial features. These results not only help us to understand the mechanisms involved in face matching tasks, but open the possibility of using facial feature recognition training in those scenarios whereby face identification is paramount (e.g., passport control).
My PhD student, Jasmine Lee, presented a poster exploring visual strategies involved on the processing of the own face, familiar and unfamiliar faces. Her results show that, in contrast to familiar and unfamiliar faces, people tend to use a more featural processing strategy for the recognition of the own face.