Perception and memory-based representations of facial emotions: Associations with personality functioning, affective states and recognition abilities.

Personality traits and affective states are associated with biases in facial emotion perception. However, the precise personality impairments and affective states that underlie these biases remain largely unknown. To investigate how relevant factors influence facial emotion perception and recollection, Experiment 1 employed an image reconstruction approach in which community-dwelling adults (N = 89) rated the similarity of pairs of facial expressions, including those recalled from memory. Subsequently, perception- and memory-based expression representations derived from such ratings were assessed across participants and related to measures of personality impairment, state affect, and visual recognition abilities. Impairment in self-direction and level of positive affect accounted for the largest components of individual variability in perception and memory representations, respectively. Additionally, individual differences in these representations were impacted by face recognition ability. In Experiment 2, adult participants (N = 81) rated facial image reconstructions derived in Experiment 1, revealing that individual variability was associated with specific visual face properties, such as expressiveness, representation accuracy, and positivity/negativity. These findings highlight and clarify the influence of personality, affective state, and recognition abilities on individual differences in the perception and recollection of facial expressions.

Using image reconstruction to investigate face perception in amnesia.

Damage to the medial temporal lobe (MTL), which is traditionally considered to subserve memory exclusively, has been reported to contribute to impaired face perception. However, it remains unknown how exactly such brain lesions may impact face representations and in particular facial shape and surface information, both of which are crucial for face perception. The present study employed a behavioral-based image reconstruction approach to reveal the pictorial representations of face perception in two amnesic patients: DA, who has an extensive bilateral MTL lesion that extends beyond the MTL in the right hemisphere, and BL, who has damage to the hippocampal dentate gyrus (DG). Both patients and their respective matched controls completed similarity judgments for pairs of faces, from which facial shape and surface features were subsequently derived and synthesized to create images of reconstructed facial appearance. Participants also completed a face oddity judgment task (FOJT) that has previously been shown to be sensitive to MTL cortical damage. While BL exhibited an impaired pattern of performance on the FOJT, DA demonstrated intact performance accuracy. Notably, the recovered pictorial content of faces was comparable between both patients and controls, although there was evidence for atypical face representations in BL particularly with regards to color. Our work provides novel insight into the face representations underlying face perception in two well-studied amnesic patients in the literature and demonstrates the applicability of the image reconstruction approach to individuals with brain damage.

Image reconstruction reveals the impact of aging on face perception.

Extensive work has demonstrated an age-related decline in face recognition, but the nature and the extent of aging-related alterations in face representations remain unclear. Here, we address these issues using an image reconstruction approach to reveal the content of visual representations. Healthy young and older adults provided similarity judgments for pairs of face images. Facial shape and surface features were subsequently derived and combined into image reconstructions of facial appearance. Both objective and experimental evaluations revealed that reconstructions were successful for every participant. Critically, shape and surface properties, such as eye shape and skin tone, were less accurately represented in older than young individuals. Yet, age-related differences in face representations, though significant, were less pronounced than those due to individual variability. Our results provide novel insights into age-related changes in visual perception and demonstrate the utility of image reconstruction to uncovering internal representations across a variety of populations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Memory and Perception-based Facial Image Reconstruction.

Visual memory for faces has been extensively researched, especially regarding the main factors that influence face memorability. However, what we remember exactly about a face, namely, the pictorial content of visual memory, remains largely unclear. The current work aims to elucidate this issue by reconstructing face images from both perceptual and memory-based behavioural data. Specifically, our work builds upon and further validates the hypothesis that visual memory and perception share a common representational basis underlying facial identity recognition. To this end, we derived facial features directly from perceptual data and then used such features for image reconstruction separately from perception and memory data. Successful levels of reconstruction were achieved in both cases for newly-learned faces as well as for familiar faces retrieved from long-term memory. Theoretically, this work provides insights into the content of memory-based representations while, practically, it may open the path to novel applications, such as computer-based 'sketch artists'.