Identity Information Content Depends on the Type of Facial Movement

Overview

Journal Sci Rep

Specialty Science

Date 2016 Sep 30

PMID 27683087

Citations 7

Authors

Katharina Dobs

Isabelle Bulthoff

Johannes Schultz

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Facial movements convey information about many social cues, including identity. However, how much information about a person's identity is conveyed by different kinds of facial movements is unknown. We addressed this question using a recent motion capture and animation system, with which we animated one avatar head with facial movements of three types: (1) emotional, (2) emotional in social interaction and (3) conversational, all recorded from several actors. In a delayed match-to-sample task, observers were best at matching actor identity across conversational movements, worse with emotional movements in social interactions, and at chance level with emotional facial expressions. Model observers performing this task showed similar performance profiles, indicating that performance variation was due to differences in information content, rather than processing. Our results suggest that conversational facial movements transmit more dynamic identity information than emotional facial expressions, thus suggesting different functional roles and processing mechanisms for different types of facial motion.

Citing Articles

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Challenging the Classical View: Recognition of Identity and Expression as Integrated Processes.

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Caricatured facial movements enhance perception of emotional facial expressions.

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Visual mechanisms for voice-identity recognition flexibly adjust to auditory noise level.

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