Dana Roark | University of Texas at Dallas (original) (raw)
Papers by Dana Roark
In the real world, faces are in constant motion. Recently, researchers have begun to consider how... more In the real world, faces are in constant motion. Recently, researchers have begun to consider how facial motion affects memory for faces. We offer a theoretical framework that synthesizes psychological findings on memory for moving faces. Three hypotheses about the possible roles of facial motion in memory are evaluated. In general, although facial motion is helpful for recognizing familiar/famous faces, its benefits are less certain with unfamiliar faces. Importantly, the implicit social signals provided by a moving face (e.g., gaze changes, expression, and facial speech) may mediate the effects of facial motion on recognition. Insights from the developmental literature, which highlight the significance of attention in the processing of social information from faces are also discussed. Finally, a neural systems framework that considers both the processing of socially relevant motion information and static feature-based information is presented. This neural systems model provides a useful framework for understanding the divergent psychological findings.
A furrowed brow, a tilt of the head, a roll of the eyes,. .. faces 'speak' through movements, as ... more A furrowed brow, a tilt of the head, a roll of the eyes,. .. faces 'speak' through movements, as well as words. Indeed, facial motion is vital to human communication (see Box 1), but does it help or hinder the recognition process? Can visual memory use dynamic information for face recognition? We first review the literature on recognition of moving faces and organize the common themes that emerge into explicit hypotheses. Next, we link current knowledge about the neural basis of face processing to the behavioral findings. Finally, we propose a framework for mapping studies of memory for moving faces onto plausible neural processing systems.
In the real world, faces are in constant motion. Recently, researchers have begun to consider how... more In the real world, faces are in constant motion. Recently, researchers have begun to consider how facial motion affects memory for faces. We offer a theoretical framework that synthesizes psychological findings on memory for moving faces. Three hypotheses about the possible roles of facial motion in memory are evaluated. In general, although facial motion is helpful for recognizing familiar/famous faces, its benefits are less certain with unfamiliar faces. Importantly, the implicit social signals provided by a moving face (e.g., gaze changes, expression, and facial speech) may mediate the effects of facial motion on recognition. Insights from the developmental literature, which highlight the significance of attention in the processing of social information from faces are also discussed. Finally, a neural systems framework that considers both the processing of socially relevant motion information and static feature-based information is presented. This neural systems model provides a useful framework for understanding the divergent psychological findings.
The human face is a captivating stimulus, even when it is stationary. In motion, however , the fa... more The human face is a captivating stimulus, even when it is stationary. In motion, however , the face comes to life and o¤ers us a myriad of information about the intent and personality of its owner. Through facial movements such as expressions we can gauge a person's current state of mind. By perceiving the movements of the mouth as a friend speaks, a conversation becomes more intelligible in a noisy environment. Through the rigid movement of the head and the direction of eye gaze, we can follow another person's focus of attention in a crowded room. The amount and diversity of social information that can be conveyed by a face ensures its place as a central focal object in any scene. Beyond the rich communication signals that we perceive in facial expressions, head orientation, eye gaze, and facial speech motions, it is also pertinent to ask whether the movements of a face help us to remember a person. The answer to this question can potentially advance our understanding of ho...
Insights from Experiments and Computation, 2010
Behavorial and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, 2003
In the real world, faces are in constant motion. Recently, researchers have begun to consider how... more In the real world, faces are in constant motion. Recently, researchers have begun to consider how facial motion affects memory for faces. We offer a theoretical framework that synthesizes psychological findings on memory for moving faces. Three hypotheses about the possible roles of facial motion in memory are evaluated. In general, although facial motion is helpful for recognizing familiar/famous faces, its benefits are less certain with unfamiliar faces. Importantly, the implicit social signals provided by a moving face (e.g., gaze changes, expression, and facial speech) may mediate the effects of facial motion on recognition. Insights from the developmental literature, which highlight the significance of attention in the processing of social information from faces are also discussed. Finally, a neural systems framework that considers both the processing of socially relevant motion information and static feature-based information is presented. This neural systems model provides a useful framework for understanding the divergent psychological findings.
Vision Research, 2011
The goal of this study was to evaluate human accuracy at identifying people from static and dynam... more The goal of this study was to evaluate human accuracy at identifying people from static and dynamic presentations of faces and bodies. Participants matched identity in pairs of videos depicting people in motion (walking or conversing) and in "best" static images extracted from the videos. The type of information presented to observers was varied to include the face and body, the face-only, and the body-only. Identification performance was best when people viewed the face and body in motion. There was an advantage for dynamic over static stimuli, but only for conditions that included the body. Control experiments with multiple-static images indicated that some of the motion advantages we obtained were due to seeing multiple images of the person, rather than to the motion, per se. To computationally assess the contribution of different types of information for identification, we fused the identity judgments from observers in different conditions using a statistical learning algorithm trained to optimize identification accuracy. This fusion achieved perfect performance. The condition weights that resulted suggest that static displays encourage reliance on the face for recognition, whereas dynamic displays seem to direct attention more equitably across the body and face.
Perception, 2006
Familiarity with a face or person can support recognition in tasks that require generalization to... more Familiarity with a face or person can support recognition in tasks that require generalization to novel viewing contexts. Using naturalistic viewing conditions requiring recognition of people from face or whole body gait stimuli, we investigated the effects of familiarity, facial motion, and direction of learning/test transfer on person recognition. Participants were familiarized with previously unknown people from gait videos and were tested on faces (experiment 1a) or were familiarized with faces and were tested with gait videos (experiment 1b). Recognition was more accurate when learning from the face and testing with the gait videos, than when learning from the gait videos and testing with the face. The repetition of a single stimulus, either the face or gait, produced strong recognition gains across transfer conditions. Also, the presentation of moving faces resulted in better performance than that of static faces. In experiment 2, we investigated the role of facial motion furt...
Journal of Vision, 2010
Information for identifying a human face can be found both in the invariant structure of features... more Information for identifying a human face can be found both in the invariant structure of features and in idiosyncratic movements and gestures. When both kinds of information are available, psychological evidence indicates that: (1) dynamic information contributes more to recognition under non-optimal viewing conditions, e.g. poor illumination, low image resolution, recognition from a distance; (2) dynamic information contributes more as a viewer's experience with the face increases; and (3) a structure-from-motion analysis can make a perceptually based contribution to face recognition. A recently proposed distributed neural system for face perception, with minor modifications, can accommodate the psychological findings with moving faces.
Journal of Vision, 2004
Abstract Recognizing people in naturalistic contexts requires an ability to extract identity-spec... more Abstract Recognizing people in naturalistic contexts requires an ability to extract identity-specific information from static and dynamic displays that may vary substantially in viewpoint and image resolution. The task is complicated further by the fact that videos contain ...
Understanding the human performance factors that mediate successful person identification can be ... more Understanding the human performance factors that mediate successful person identification can be helpful in the development of automatic face recognition algorithms. Face familiarity and facial motion are two factors that seem especially useful when subjects make recognition decisions from challenging viewing formats. We tested the effects of these two factors on person recognition from naturalistic, surveillance-like video. Subjects learned faces from either static photographs or facial speech videos and were asked to recognize people from whole body gait videos. We found that the more experience participants had with a face during learning (i.e., 1-view, 2-view, and 4-view conditions), the better their recognition performance for people in the whole body video gait clips. Thus, familiarizing subjects with high-resolution images or videos of faces was sufficient to improve recognition from low-resolution, whole-body images. Moreover, participants who learned faces from dynamic video clips were more accurate than participants who learned the faces from static images, but only when they were familiar with the faces. Facial motion and face familiarity may therefore play a role in understanding recognition when there are photometric inconsistencies between learning and test stimuli.
Face Processing: Advanced …, 2006
The ability of humans to recognize faces provides an implicit benchmark for gauging the performan... more The ability of humans to recognize faces provides an implicit benchmark for gauging the performance of automatic face recognition algorithms. In this chapter we review the factors that affect human accuracy. These factors can be classified into facial stucture constraints and viewing parameters. The former include factors such as face typicality, gender, and ethnicity. The latter include changes in illumination and viewpoint, as well as the perceptual complications introduced when we see faces and people in motion. The common thread of the chapter is that human experience and familiarity with faces can overcome many, if not all, of these challenges to face recognition. A goal of computional algorithms should be to emulate the ways in which humans acquire familiarity with faces. It may then be possible to apply these principles to the design of algorithms to meet the pressing challenges of face recognition in naturalistic vieiwng conditions.
... Recognizing people from naturalistic video: The effects of facial motion and familiarity.Dana... more ... Recognizing people from naturalistic video: The effects of facial motion and familiarity.Dana A Roark danar{at}utdallas.edu 1,; Alice J O'Toole and; Hervé Abdi. 1 University of Texas at Dallas, USA. Abstract. To date, there is limited ...
In the real world, faces are in constant motion. Recently, researchers have begun to consider how... more In the real world, faces are in constant motion. Recently, researchers have begun to consider how facial motion affects memory for faces. We offer a theoretical framework that synthesizes psychological findings on memory for moving faces. Three hypotheses about the possible roles of facial motion in memory are evaluated. In general, although facial motion is helpful for recognizing familiar/famous faces, its benefits are less certain with unfamiliar faces. Importantly, the implicit social signals provided by a moving face (e.g., gaze changes, expression, and facial speech) may mediate the effects of facial motion on recognition. Insights from the developmental literature, which highlight the significance of attention in the processing of social information from faces are also discussed. Finally, a neural systems framework that considers both the processing of socially relevant motion information and static feature-based information is presented. This neural systems model provides a useful framework for understanding the divergent psychological findings.
A furrowed brow, a tilt of the head, a roll of the eyes,. .. faces 'speak' through movements, as ... more A furrowed brow, a tilt of the head, a roll of the eyes,. .. faces 'speak' through movements, as well as words. Indeed, facial motion is vital to human communication (see Box 1), but does it help or hinder the recognition process? Can visual memory use dynamic information for face recognition? We first review the literature on recognition of moving faces and organize the common themes that emerge into explicit hypotheses. Next, we link current knowledge about the neural basis of face processing to the behavioral findings. Finally, we propose a framework for mapping studies of memory for moving faces onto plausible neural processing systems.
In the real world, faces are in constant motion. Recently, researchers have begun to consider how... more In the real world, faces are in constant motion. Recently, researchers have begun to consider how facial motion affects memory for faces. We offer a theoretical framework that synthesizes psychological findings on memory for moving faces. Three hypotheses about the possible roles of facial motion in memory are evaluated. In general, although facial motion is helpful for recognizing familiar/famous faces, its benefits are less certain with unfamiliar faces. Importantly, the implicit social signals provided by a moving face (e.g., gaze changes, expression, and facial speech) may mediate the effects of facial motion on recognition. Insights from the developmental literature, which highlight the significance of attention in the processing of social information from faces are also discussed. Finally, a neural systems framework that considers both the processing of socially relevant motion information and static feature-based information is presented. This neural systems model provides a useful framework for understanding the divergent psychological findings.
The human face is a captivating stimulus, even when it is stationary. In motion, however , the fa... more The human face is a captivating stimulus, even when it is stationary. In motion, however , the face comes to life and o¤ers us a myriad of information about the intent and personality of its owner. Through facial movements such as expressions we can gauge a person's current state of mind. By perceiving the movements of the mouth as a friend speaks, a conversation becomes more intelligible in a noisy environment. Through the rigid movement of the head and the direction of eye gaze, we can follow another person's focus of attention in a crowded room. The amount and diversity of social information that can be conveyed by a face ensures its place as a central focal object in any scene. Beyond the rich communication signals that we perceive in facial expressions, head orientation, eye gaze, and facial speech motions, it is also pertinent to ask whether the movements of a face help us to remember a person. The answer to this question can potentially advance our understanding of ho...
Insights from Experiments and Computation, 2010
Behavorial and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, 2003
In the real world, faces are in constant motion. Recently, researchers have begun to consider how... more In the real world, faces are in constant motion. Recently, researchers have begun to consider how facial motion affects memory for faces. We offer a theoretical framework that synthesizes psychological findings on memory for moving faces. Three hypotheses about the possible roles of facial motion in memory are evaluated. In general, although facial motion is helpful for recognizing familiar/famous faces, its benefits are less certain with unfamiliar faces. Importantly, the implicit social signals provided by a moving face (e.g., gaze changes, expression, and facial speech) may mediate the effects of facial motion on recognition. Insights from the developmental literature, which highlight the significance of attention in the processing of social information from faces are also discussed. Finally, a neural systems framework that considers both the processing of socially relevant motion information and static feature-based information is presented. This neural systems model provides a useful framework for understanding the divergent psychological findings.
Vision Research, 2011
The goal of this study was to evaluate human accuracy at identifying people from static and dynam... more The goal of this study was to evaluate human accuracy at identifying people from static and dynamic presentations of faces and bodies. Participants matched identity in pairs of videos depicting people in motion (walking or conversing) and in "best" static images extracted from the videos. The type of information presented to observers was varied to include the face and body, the face-only, and the body-only. Identification performance was best when people viewed the face and body in motion. There was an advantage for dynamic over static stimuli, but only for conditions that included the body. Control experiments with multiple-static images indicated that some of the motion advantages we obtained were due to seeing multiple images of the person, rather than to the motion, per se. To computationally assess the contribution of different types of information for identification, we fused the identity judgments from observers in different conditions using a statistical learning algorithm trained to optimize identification accuracy. This fusion achieved perfect performance. The condition weights that resulted suggest that static displays encourage reliance on the face for recognition, whereas dynamic displays seem to direct attention more equitably across the body and face.
Perception, 2006
Familiarity with a face or person can support recognition in tasks that require generalization to... more Familiarity with a face or person can support recognition in tasks that require generalization to novel viewing contexts. Using naturalistic viewing conditions requiring recognition of people from face or whole body gait stimuli, we investigated the effects of familiarity, facial motion, and direction of learning/test transfer on person recognition. Participants were familiarized with previously unknown people from gait videos and were tested on faces (experiment 1a) or were familiarized with faces and were tested with gait videos (experiment 1b). Recognition was more accurate when learning from the face and testing with the gait videos, than when learning from the gait videos and testing with the face. The repetition of a single stimulus, either the face or gait, produced strong recognition gains across transfer conditions. Also, the presentation of moving faces resulted in better performance than that of static faces. In experiment 2, we investigated the role of facial motion furt...
Journal of Vision, 2010
Information for identifying a human face can be found both in the invariant structure of features... more Information for identifying a human face can be found both in the invariant structure of features and in idiosyncratic movements and gestures. When both kinds of information are available, psychological evidence indicates that: (1) dynamic information contributes more to recognition under non-optimal viewing conditions, e.g. poor illumination, low image resolution, recognition from a distance; (2) dynamic information contributes more as a viewer's experience with the face increases; and (3) a structure-from-motion analysis can make a perceptually based contribution to face recognition. A recently proposed distributed neural system for face perception, with minor modifications, can accommodate the psychological findings with moving faces.
Journal of Vision, 2004
Abstract Recognizing people in naturalistic contexts requires an ability to extract identity-spec... more Abstract Recognizing people in naturalistic contexts requires an ability to extract identity-specific information from static and dynamic displays that may vary substantially in viewpoint and image resolution. The task is complicated further by the fact that videos contain ...
Understanding the human performance factors that mediate successful person identification can be ... more Understanding the human performance factors that mediate successful person identification can be helpful in the development of automatic face recognition algorithms. Face familiarity and facial motion are two factors that seem especially useful when subjects make recognition decisions from challenging viewing formats. We tested the effects of these two factors on person recognition from naturalistic, surveillance-like video. Subjects learned faces from either static photographs or facial speech videos and were asked to recognize people from whole body gait videos. We found that the more experience participants had with a face during learning (i.e., 1-view, 2-view, and 4-view conditions), the better their recognition performance for people in the whole body video gait clips. Thus, familiarizing subjects with high-resolution images or videos of faces was sufficient to improve recognition from low-resolution, whole-body images. Moreover, participants who learned faces from dynamic video clips were more accurate than participants who learned the faces from static images, but only when they were familiar with the faces. Facial motion and face familiarity may therefore play a role in understanding recognition when there are photometric inconsistencies between learning and test stimuli.
Face Processing: Advanced …, 2006
The ability of humans to recognize faces provides an implicit benchmark for gauging the performan... more The ability of humans to recognize faces provides an implicit benchmark for gauging the performance of automatic face recognition algorithms. In this chapter we review the factors that affect human accuracy. These factors can be classified into facial stucture constraints and viewing parameters. The former include factors such as face typicality, gender, and ethnicity. The latter include changes in illumination and viewpoint, as well as the perceptual complications introduced when we see faces and people in motion. The common thread of the chapter is that human experience and familiarity with faces can overcome many, if not all, of these challenges to face recognition. A goal of computional algorithms should be to emulate the ways in which humans acquire familiarity with faces. It may then be possible to apply these principles to the design of algorithms to meet the pressing challenges of face recognition in naturalistic vieiwng conditions.
... Recognizing people from naturalistic video: The effects of facial motion and familiarity.Dana... more ... Recognizing people from naturalistic video: The effects of facial motion and familiarity.Dana A Roark danar{at}utdallas.edu 1,; Alice J O'Toole and; Hervé Abdi. 1 University of Texas at Dallas, USA. Abstract. To date, there is limited ...