"Caucasians and Asians don't examine faces in the same way, according to new research. PhD student Caroline Blais, of the Université de Montréal Department of Psychology, has published two studies on the subject: one in Current Biology and the other in PLoS One."
Above is a great, albeit quick, example of research being done on facial recognition, and featural processing strategies. The article suggests that the common assumption that all facial recognition follows a bottom-up approach, in that various individual parts of a persons face are combined and an overall impression is then formed, may be accurate for causasions, but not other races.
Using eye-tracking technology the research demonstrated that causasions spend most time shifting between both eyes and the mouth forming a recognizable "triangle" pattern. However, Asians were demonstrated to spend time focusing on the nose and using a wholistic or top-down approach. The research went on to demonstrate that Asians also had a difficulty distinguishing between various negative emotions which included subtle facial distinctions (e.g. variations in mouth positioning).
I'm interested to know some of the implications of this research to witness identification. The article suggests that neither bottom-up nor top-down processing is better per se, only that they function differently in various contexts. It would seem that bottom-up processing should take longer yet be more detailed, however I guess research does not suggest this to be the case. And what reasons are there for this distinction between Asian and Caucasians facial processing techniques?
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