Perception: Bruce and Young's Theory of Facial Recognition Flashcards
Draw out Bruce and Young’s Theory in a diagram
Describe the Face Recognition Unit (FRU)
Face recognition units (FRUs) contain information about the faces you know. If the encoded information has a reasonable match with this information then the FRU is activated and triggers the next node, the person identity node.
Describe the Person Identity Node (PIN)
PINs contain information about a person;s identity, such as their occupation, their interests and so on. Once a person’s indentity is established, then a person’s name can be retrieved (name retrieval unit NRU)
Describe the Name Retrieval Unit (NRU)
The NRU is the unit which can retrieve a person’s name once they have been identified.
Explain expression analysis node
Expression analysis node recieves data which is used to work out the meaning of facial expressions.
Explain facial speech analysis
To use lip movements to help understand what someone is saying
Explain directed visual processing
Used to search for specific features that will help face recognition
State a study which support Bruce and Young’s Theory’s
Young et al. performed two studies which the findings support Bruce and Young’s Theory
Describe Young et al’s findings
Young et al. conducted a diary study where they asked 22 participants to keep a record of the mistakes they made when recognising people over an eight-week period. they found that many errors involving recalling information baout a person but no recalling a name without some relecant personal identity information. the pattern of these errors is explained by the serial nature of the model (PIN comes before NRU).
Describe Youn et al.’s other findings
Young et al.’s found that pas predicted participants were faster at identifying whether a particular face was that of a politician than they were at identfying the politician’s name.
Explain the strengths and limitations of Bruce and Young’s Theory
The main strength of the model is that it generates precise predictions that can be tested, and that further our knowledge of face recognition. The model also spells out the differences in the way familiar and unfamiliar faces are processed. However, the details of unfamiliar face processing are vague and other components of the model, such as the cognitive sustem are also not clearly specified.
AID: Real World Application
The study of face recognition has important applications, for instance in the production of machines that will recognise faces for security and in assisting police to produce accurate eyewitness records. Such systems have been developed in conjunction with psychological research on how people recognise faces.
Explain how the Thatcher effect supports Bruce and Young’s Theory
The Thatcher effect is that when a face is upside down, configural processing cannot take place (processing where features viewed are related to each other rather than feature-by-feature detection). This means that minor feature differences are more difficult to detect and supports the notion of a unique face processor.
