Catherine J Mondloch

Catherine J Mondloch
Brock University · Psyc

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164
Publications
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9,204
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise

Publications

Publications (164)
Preprint
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How face perceptions unfold during ontogeny shapes how humans navigate adult social life. A vast literature implicates variation in sexually dimorphic facial characteristics in guiding judgments relating to suites of key life choices, ranging from partner choices to preferences for leaders. Although growing evidence supports that facial morphology...
Preprint
How face perceptions unfold during ontogeny shapes how humans navigate adult social life. A vast literature implicates variation in sexually dimorphic facial characteristics in guiding judgments relating to suites of key life choices, ranging from partner choices to preferences for leaders. Although growing evidence supports that facial morphology...
Article
Viewing multiple images of a newly encountered face improves recognition of that identity in new instances. Studies examining face learning have presented high-variability (HV) images that incorporate changes that occur from moment-to-moment (e.g., head orientation and expression) and over time (e.g., lighting, hairstyle, and health). We examined w...
Article
Full-text available
General Audience Summary Photo identification is relied upon in a variety of applied settings—when traveling, accessing health care, and purchasing age-restricted goods. People match familiar faces with ease, but matching faces of unfamiliar people is challenging. The same person can vary in appearance, and different people can look similar. No tra...
Article
Ensemble coding – the rapid extraction of a perceptual average – has been proposed as a potential mechanism underlying face learning. We tested this proposal across five pre-registered experiments in which four ambient images of an identity were presented in the study phase. In Experiments 1 and 2a-c, participants were asked whether a test image wa...
Article
Full-text available
We provide the first examination of individual differences in the efficiency of face learning. Investigating individual differences in face learning can illuminate potential mechanisms and provide greater understanding of why certain individuals might be more efficient face learners. Participants completed two unfamiliar face matching tasks and a l...
Article
Sutherland and Young's perspective is a timely and rigorous examination of trait impressions based on facial cues. We propose three strtegies to further advance the field: incorporating natural language processing, including diverse facial stimuli, and re‐interpreting developmental data.
Article
Adults are experts at recognizing familiar faces across images that incorporate natural within-person variability in appearance (i.e., ambient images). Little is known about children's ability to do so. In the current study, we investigated whether 4- to 7-year-olds (n = 56) could recognize images of their own parent-a person with whom children hav...
Article
Full-text available
People often find it more difficult to recognize other- than own-race faces. This other-race effect is robust across numerous ethnic groups. Yet, it remains unclear how this effect changes in people who live in a multiracial environment, and in immigrants whose lifetime perceptual experience changes over time. In the present study, we developed a n...
Article
With the exception of super recognizers and forensic examiners, people make a surprising number of errors when deciding whether photographs of unfamiliar faces belong to the same person or different people. Training protocols designed to improve professionals’ (e.g., passport officers) performance often include photography. We evaluated the influen...
Article
First impressions based on facial cues have the potential to influence how older adults (OAs), a vulnerable population, are treated by others. The present study used a data‐driven approach to examine dimensions underlying first impressions of OAs and whether those dimensions vary by perceiver age. In Experiment 1, young adult (YA) and OA participan...
Article
Considering the widespread use of face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, the goal of the current study was to examine how occlusion of the lower half of the face may impact first impression formation. We conducted three experiments, each building on previous research, investigating the effect of face masks on first impressions of faces across the...
Article
Full-text available
Matching identity in images of unfamiliar faces is error prone, but we can easily recognize highly variable images of familiar faces – even images taken decades apart. Recent theoretical development based on computational modelling can account for how we recognize extremely variable instances of the same identity. We provide complementary behaviour...
Article
Children under 6 years of age have difficulty recognizing a familiar face across changes in appearance and telling the face apart from similar-looking people. Understanding the process by which newly encountered faces become familiar can provide insights into these difficulties. Exposure to the ways in which a person varies in appearance is one mec...
Article
Recent research has emphasized the importance of using images that incorporate natural variability in appearance (i.e., ambient images) to assess face learning and recognition. Across five tasks, we provide the first examination of older adults’ face learning and recognition in ambient images. Young and older adults showed comparable performance in...
Article
Although the other-race effect (ORE; superior recognition of own- relative to other-race faces) is well established, the mechanisms underlying it are not well understood. We examined whether the ORE is attributable to differential use of shape and texture cues for own- vs. other-race faces. Shape cues are particularly important for detecting that a...
Article
Despite the profound behavioral consequences that first impressions of trustworthiness have on adult populations, few studies have examined how adults' first impressions of trustworthiness influence behavioral outcomes for children. Using a novel task design, we examined adults' perceptions of children's behavior in ambiguous situations. After a br...
Article
Full-text available
Recognizing emotional expressions across different people and discriminating between them are important social skills. We examined their development using a novel free-sorting task in which children (aged 5 to 10) and adults sorted 20 faces (posing sadness, anger, fear, and disgust) into piles such that all faces in each pile were feeling the same....
Preprint
Perceptions of traits (such as trustworthiness or dominance) are influenced by the emotion displayed on a face. For instance, the same individual is reported as more trustworthy when they look happy than when they look angry. This overextension of emotional expressions has been shown with facial expression but whether this phenomenon also occurs wh...
Article
The ability to recognize identity despite within‐person variability in appearance is likely a face‐specific skill and shaped by experience. Ensemble coding – the automatic extraction of the average of a stimulus array – has been proposed as a mechanism underlying face learning (allowing one to recognize novel instances of a newly learned face). We...
Conference Paper
Adults show an other-race effect (ORE): impaired recognition of other- versus own-race faces1. The ORE manifests as a difficulty recognizing other-race faces across variability in appearance, likely due to asymmetric experience with own- and other-race faces2,3. No study has systematically investigated how the ability to form stable facial represen...
Article
Two photos of an unfamiliar face are often perceived as belonging to different people—an error that disappears when a face is familiar. Face learning has been characterized as increased tolerance of within-person variability in appearance and is facilitated by exposure to such variability (e.g., differences in expression, lighting, and aesthetics)....
Article
Being born at extremely low birth weight (ELBW; ≤1000g) is associated with enduring visual impairments. We tested for long‐term, higher‐order visual processing problems in the oldest known prospectively followed cohort of ELBW survivors. Configural processing (spacing among features of an object) was examined in 62 adults born at ELBW (Mage = 31.9...
Article
Adults' face processing may be specialized for the dimensions of young adult faces. For example, young and older adults exhibit increased accuracy in normality judgments and greater agreement in attractiveness ratings for young versus older adult faces. The present study was designed to examine whether there is a similar young adult face bias in fa...
Article
We examined the utility of a gaze cueing paradigm to examine sensitivity to differences among negatively valenced expressions. Participants judged target stimuli (dangerous or safe), the location of which was cued by the gaze direction of a central face. Dawel et al. reported that gaze cueing effects (faster response times on valid vs. invalid tria...
Article
Full-text available
Adults’ ability to match identity in images of unfamiliar faces is impaired for other- compared with own-race faces; their ability to match identity in images of familiar faces is independent of face race. Exposure to within-person variability in appearance plays a key role in face learning. Past research suggests that children need exposure to hig...
Article
The majority of studies of emotion perception have relied on static isolated facial expressions. These expressions differ markedly from real-world expressions that include movement and multiple cues (e.g., bodies), leaving our understanding of how expression perception develops incomplete. We examined the looking patterns of younger children (4- an...
Article
Nearly every study investigating the development of face recognition has focused on the ability to tell people apart using one or two tightly controlled images to represent each identity. Such research ignores the challenge of recognizing the same person despite variability in appearance. Whereas natural variation in appearance makes unfamiliar fac...
Article
Adults' ability to recognize individual faces is shaped by experience. Young adults recognize own-age and own-race faces more accurately than other-age and other-race faces. The own-age and own-race biases have been attributed to differential perceptual experience and to differences in how in-group vs. out-group faces are processed, with in-group f...
Article
Full-text available
Other-race faces are discriminated and recognized less accurately than own-race faces. Despite a wealth of research characterizing this other-race effect (ORE), little is known about the nature of the representations of own-race versus other-race faces. This is because traditional measures of this ORE provide a binary measure of discrimination or r...
Article
Full-text available
General Audience Summary Two photos of the same person can look very different; likewise, photos of two different people can look very similar. Making identity judgements (e.g., do these photos belong to the same person or two different people?) can be very challenging when viewing unfamiliar faces, especially when the face is of a different race t...
Preprint
Other-race faces are discriminated and recognized less accurately than own-race faces. Despite a wealth of research characterizing this other-race effect (ORE), little is known about the nature of the representations of own- vs. other-race faces. This is because traditional measures of this other-race effect provide a binary measure of discriminati...
Article
When viewing unfamiliar faces, photographs of the same person often are perceived as belonging to different people and photographs of different people as belonging to the same person. Identity matching of unfamiliar faces is especially challenging when the photographs are of a person whose ethnicity differs from that of the observer. In contrast, m...
Article
A growing literature shows that body postures influence recognition of static facial expressions; a fearful face, for example, is perceived as angry when presented on an angry body posture. In daily life, however, people conveying emotions are moving. Here we provide the first examination of such congruency effects for stimuli with naturalistic mov...
Article
Full-text available
We investigated recognition of familiar and unfamiliar own- and other-race faces across natural variability in appearance. Participants sorted 20 photographs of each of two identities into piles such that each pile contained all photographs of a single identity. The other-race effect was limited to unfamiliar faces. When faces were unfamiliar, part...
Article
Considerable research examining the other-race effect (e.g., better recognition of own-race than other-race faces) has proposed that impaired recognition of other-race faces can be attributed to the inefficient storage and retrieval of other-race face representations from memory. However, little is known about the precision with which own- versus o...
Article
Young adults typically recognize young adult faces more accurately than older adult faces (own-age bias [OAB]). However, most research on this topic has measured recognition memory for controlled images of different identities and participants typically are instructed to memorize faces during a study phase. We investigate the OAB for images incorpo...
Article
Our representations for familiar faces are thought to be invariant to changes in their appearance. However, one aspect of invariance that has received little attention is whether our familiar face representations are invariant to the changes brought about by aging. Young and Bruce (2011) pose the question "Do we have one FRU for Paul McCartney when...
Article
Full-text available
Young and older adults are more sensitive to deviations from normality in young than older adult faces, suggesting that the dimensions of face space are optimized for young adult faces. Here, we extend these findings to own-race faces and provide converging evidence using an attractiveness rating task. In Experiment 1, Caucasian and Chinese adults...
Article
Full-text available
The purpose of this study was to summarise recent research activity from 2009 to 2013 of faculty in Canadian developmental psychology programs, as there have been no previous studies on this stream in Canada. Rankings for research productivity (i.e., number of publications) and impact (e.g., citation counts) were evaluated using the Publish or Peri...
Article
Most previous research on the development of face recognition has focused on recognition of highly controlled images. One of the biggest challenges of face recognition is to identify an individual across images that capture natural variability in appearance. We created a child-friendly version of Jenkins, White, Van Montford, and Burton's sorting t...
Article
Adults recognize own-race faces more accurately than other-race faces. We investigated three characteristics of laboratory investigations hypothesized to minimize the magnitude of the own-race recognition advantage (ORA): lack of competition for attention and instructions that emphasize individuating faces during the study phase, and a lack of unce...
Article
Full-text available
Poorer recognition of other-race faces than own-races faces has been attributed to a problem of discrimination (i.e., telling faces apart). The conclusion that 'they all look the same to me' is based on studies measuring the perception/memory of highly controlled stimuli, typically involving only one or two images of each identity. We hypothesized...
Article
Adults recognize young faces and own-race faces more accurately than older and other-race faces, respectively. We recently reported that young and older adults are more sensitive to deviations from normality in young than older adult faces and that there is more between-participant variability (i.e., less consensus) in attractiveness ratings for ol...
Article
We recently reported that the dimensions of face space are more well refined for young than older adult faces (Short & Mondloch, 2013). In the current study, we examined two alternative ways in which young and older adult faces might be represented in the context of a norm-based coding model. According to one model, adults possess a single age-gene...
Article
Adults' ability to recognize unfamiliar faces across images that capture within-person variability is poor, whereas their familiar face recognition is extremely good (Jenkins, White, Van Montford & Burton, 2011). Very little is known about children's ability to recognize personally familiar faces and most of what we know about unfamiliar face recog...
Article
The other-race effect (better recognition of own- compared to other-race faces) has been framed as a problem with discriminating among other-race identities. Another impairment in recognizing other-race faces is the ability to recognize the same identity across a set of images that incorporate natural variability in appearance (e.g., changes in exp...
Article
Full-text available
Studies examining own-age recognition biases report inconsistent results and often utilize paradigms that present faces individually and in isolation. We investigated young and older adults' attention towards young and older faces during learning and whether differential attention influences recognition. Participants viewed complex scenes while the...
Article
The own-age bias (OAB) in face recognition (more accurate recognition of own-age than other-age faces) is robust among young adults but not older adults. We investigated the OAB under two different task conditions. In Experiment 1 young and older adults (who reported more recent experience with own than other-age faces) completed a match-to-sample...
Article
Exposure to a distorted face results in subsequently viewed distorted faces appearing more normal. This type of face adaptation has been used extensively to probe our representations of human faces. In Experiment 1 we used the face distortion after-effect (FDAE) to explore the role of experience in the processing of unfamiliar individuals from a di...
Article
Faces are widely regarded as "special" due to our reliance on holistic or configural processing for their successful recognition. The processing of low spatial frequency information has been associated with holistic processing and is thought to promote a face-specific recognition advantage. There are reliable individual differences in face recognit...
Article
We recently reported that young and older adults are more sensitive to deviations from normality in young than older adult faces, suggesting that the dimensions of face space are optimized for the face age category to which we are most frequently exposed throughout life (Short & Mondloch, 2013). Here we report two studies designed to a) investigate...
Article
In daily life, we must interpret others' facial expressions within a given situation, but in the lab, participants are often asked to assign a label to isolated expressions. We showed participants the same set of emotional facial expressions in two different tasks to investigate whether performance on these tasks draws on different styles of visual...
Article
Sleep deprivation impacts subjective mood states, but very little research has examined the impact on processing emotional information. In the current study, we investigated the impact of total sleep deprivation on neural responses to emotional facial expressions as well as the accuracy and speed with which these faces were categorized. Forty-nine...
Article
Full-text available
Past studies examining the other-age effect, the phenomenon in which own-age faces are recognized more accurately than other-age faces, are limited in number and report inconsistent results. Here we examine whether the perceptual system is preferentially tuned to differences among young adult faces. In experiment 1 young (18-25 years) and older adu...
Article
Full-text available
The accuracy and speed with which emotional facial expressions are identified is influenced by body postures. Two influential models predict that these congruency effects will be largest when the emotion displayed in the face is similar to that displayed in the body: the emotional seed model and the dimensional model. These models differ in whether...
Article
The expertise of adults in face perception is facilitated by their ability to rapidly detect that a stimulus is a face. In two experiments, we examined the role of early visual input in the development of face detection by testing patients who had been treated as infants for bilateral congenital cataract. Experiment 1 indicated that, at age 9 to 20...
Article
Most research investigating children’s recognition of facial expressions has involved static and isolated face stimuli. However, in the real world facial expressions are dynamic and viewed in the context of body movements, background scenes, etc. We examined the influence of bodies on children’s and adults’ perception of emotional expressions using...
Article
The other-race effect (ORE: better recognition of own-race faces) is typically studied by presenting faces sequentially to participants and testing recognition using an old/new task. In the real world, people encounter multiple faces simultaneously and in complex scenes and so other-race faces compete for attention. Preferential attention to own-ra...
Article
Young adults recognize own-age faces more accurately than other-age faces, but less is known about the underlying mechanisms and there is inconsistent data concerning whether older adults show an own-age or a young-adult recognition bias. In Experiment 1 we tested young adults’ (n = 20) ability to recognize upright and inverted young versus older f...
Article
Full-text available
Early visual deprivation impairs some, but not all, aspects of face perception. We investigated the possible developmental roots of later abnormalities by using a face detection task to test infants treated for bilateral congenital cataract within 1 hour of their first focused visual input. The seven patients were between 5 and 12 weeks old (n = 3)...
Article
Adults' and 8-year-old children's perception of emotional faces is disrupted when faces are presented in the context of incongruent body postures (e.g., when a sad face is displayed on a fearful body) if the two emotions are highly similar (e.g., sad/fear) but not if they are highly dissimilar (e.g., sad/happy). The current research investigated th...
Article
Perceptual aftereffects have indicated that there is an asymmetry in the extent to which adults' representations of identity and expression are independent of one another. Their representation of expression is identity-dependent; the magnitude of expression aftereffects is reduced when the adaptation and test stimuli have different identities. In c...
Article
Previous neural research on face perception has mainly focused on the distinction between faces and non-face stimuli. However, the brain mechanisms for differentiating one face from another are not well understood. In the present study, using scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated the brain responses to faces that varied in...
Article
We used opposing figural aftereffects to investigate whether there are at least partially separable representations of upright and inverted faces in patients who missed early visual experience because of bilateral congenital cataracts (mean age at test 19.5 years). Visually normal adults and 10-year-olds were tested for comparison. Adults showed th...
Article
The human face provides a wealth of information pertaining to the internal state and life-stage history of an individual. Facial width-to-height ratio is a size-independent sexually dimorphic trait, and estimates of aggression made by untrained adults judging own-race faces were positively associated with both facial width-to-height ratio and actua...
Article
Full-text available
The facial width-to-height ratio (face ratio), is a sexually dimorphic metric associated with actual aggression in men and with observers' judgements of aggression in male faces. Here, we sought to determine if observers' judgements of aggression were associated with the face ratio in female faces. In three studies, participants rated photographs o...
Article
Infants possess only rudimentary face-processing skills, evidence from patients treated for congenital cataract and from monkeys deprived of face input for several months postnatally indicates that this early experience plays a key role in the ultimate development of expert face processing. This article provides evidence that early visual deprivati...
Article
The current research investigated the influence of body posture on adults' and children's perception of facial displays of emotion. In each of two experiments, participants categorized facial expressions that were presented on a body posture that was congruent (e.g., a sad face on a body posing sadness) or incongruent (e.g., a sad face on a body po...
Article
Research investigating the neural correlates of face processing has emphasized differences in neural activity when participants view faces versus other stimulus categories (e.g., houses). Much less is known about the neural mechanisms underlying the discrimination among individual faces. Using a large number of female faces, here we show that the a...
Article
The current research investigated the organization of children's face space by examining whether 5- and 8-year-olds show race-contingent aftereffects. Participants read a storybook in which Caucasian and Chinese children's faces were distorted in opposite directions. Before and after adaptation, participants judged the normality/attractiveness of e...
Article
Early visual deprivation caused by bilateral congenital cataracts produces deficits in discriminating faces that differ in the spacing of features, but not in feature shape (Le Grand et al. [2001] Nature 410: 810). We investigated whether these deficits are specific to human faces by testing patients' ability to discriminate between stimuli differi...

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