James W Tanaka

University of Victoria | UVIC · Department of Psychology

Saccadic choice tasks use eye movements as a response method, typically in a task where observers are asked to saccade as quickly as possible to an image of a prespecified target category. Using this approach, face-selective saccades have been observed within 100 ms poststimulus. When taking into account oculomotor processing, this suggests that fa...

A hallmark of expert object recognition is rapid and accurate subordinate-category recognition of visually homogenous objects. However, the perceptual strategies by which expert recognition is achieved is less known. The current study investigated whether visual expertise changes observers’ perceptual field (e.g., their ability to use information a...

Previous work suggests that subordinate-level object training improves exemplar-level perceptual discrimination over basic-level training. However, the extent to which visual fixation strategies and the use of visual features, such as color and spatial frequency (SF), change with improved discrimination was not previously known. In the current stud...

Humans can readily and effortlessly learn new faces encountered in the social environment. As a face transitions from unfamiliar to familiar, the ability to generalize across different images of the same person increases substantially. Fast periodic visual stimulation and EEG (FPVS-EEG) was used to isolate identity-specific responses that generaliz...

While motion information is important for the early stages of vision, it also contributes to later stages of object recognition. For example, human observers can detect the presence of a human, judge its actions, and judge its gender and identity simply based on motion cues conveyed in a point-light display. Here we examined whether object expertis...

While expert face discrimination develops naturally in humans, expert discrimination in non-face object categories, such as birds, cars and dogs, is acquired through years of experience and explicit practice. The current study used an implicit visual discrimination paradigm and electroencephalography (EEG) – Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation – to ex...

Many medical professions require practitioners to perform visual categorizations in domains such as radiology, dermatology, and neurology. However, acquiring visual expertise is tedious and time-consuming and the perceptual strategies mediating visual categorization skills are poorly understood. In this paper, the Ease algorithm was developed to pr...

The current study examined the role of color and spatial frequency on the early acquisition of perceptual expertise after one week of laboratory training with bird stimuli. Participants learned to categorize finches (or warblers) at the subordinate species level (e.g., purple finch) and categorize warblers (or finches) at the more general family le...

In the present study, we investigated face processing in individuals with self-reported Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD, n=16) and typically developing control participants (n=16) using behavioural and electrophysiological measures. As a measure of their face memory, we admistered the Cambridge Face Memory Test to participants in the ASD group. The r...

Using a composite-face paradigm, we examined the holistic processing induced by Asian faces, Caucasian faces, and monkey faces with human Asian participants in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether the upper halves of two faces successively presented were the same or different. A composite-face effect was found...

Perceptual expertise is marked by subordinate-level recognition of objects in the expert domain. In the present study, participants learned one family of full-color, artificial objects at the subordinate (species) level and another family at the basic (family) level. Discrimination of trained and untrained exemplars was tested before and after trai...

Definition A person's face is the source of their identity, a reflection of their internal emotions, and the means by which they communicate thoughts, feelings , and intentions to others. Most people are "expert" face perceivers-able to identify a familiar face, interpret a facial expression, and follow a person's gaze, instantaneously, effortlessl...

A growing body of literature suggests that human individuals differ in their ability to process face identity. These findings mainly stem from explicit behavioral tasks, such as the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT). However, it remains an open question whether such individual differences can be found in the absence of an explicit face identity tas...

Early experience can change the way people process faces. Early deafness provides deaf children with the opportunity to learn sign language, which is likely to alter their face processing strategy. The goal of the current study was to investigate whether early deafness, combined with the sign language experience, was able to change the face process...

Although a deadly form of skin cancer, melanoma is treatable if detected early. Existing approaches in melanoma detection training employ a rule-based method where lesions are assessed by their Asymmetry, Border, Color, Diameter and Evolvement in appearance (i.e., the ABCDE rule). However, the rule-based training practices in melanoma detection wer...

Object categories are the perceptual glue that holds our visual world together. They allow us to recognize familiar instances and extend recognition to novel ones. Although object categorization has been studied using supervised learning techniques, less is known about how they are spontaneously acquired through unsupervised learning. In this study...

A face varies in its retinal properties due to fluctuations in orientation, surface lighting and viewing distance. A person's facial appearance can be altered by makeup or changes associated with age and health status. Successful face recognition therefore requires that the range of face instances be correctly categorized as belonging to the same p...

Although a deadly form of skin cancer, melanoma is treatable if detected early. However, current rule-based training practices in melanoma detection are not effective. We assessed an innovative technique to train melanoma detection using the perceptual expertise principles. Participants in the training group were trained to categorize melanoma and...

Novices recognize objects at the basic-category level (e.g., dog, chair, and bird) at which identification is based on the global form of the objects (Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976). In contrast, experts recognize objects within their domain of expertise at the subordinate level (e.g., Sparrow or Finch) for which the internal ob...

In their everyday situations, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) encounter problems perceiving and understanding the facial expressions of others. If people with ASD have difficulties interpreting facial emotions, it is not surprising that they would struggle in their daily social interactions. An important question is whether facial e...

Successful everyday, social interactions are mediated by the accurate perception of dynamic facial expressions. For example, the decoding of distress cues have been shown to inhibit antisocial behaviour while simultaneously eliciting empathetic responses. The import of this recognition-behaviour connection has been revealed by psychiatric research...

Fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) is a powerful method for investigating the brain activity underlying human face processing. Previous studies have shown that FPVS provides a reliable index of the face inversion effect (FIE) (Liu-Shuang et al., 2013) and individual differences in face recognition ability (Xu et al., 2014). In the current stud...

Young infants are typically thought to prefer looking at smiling expressions. Although some accounts suggest that the preference is automatic and universal, we hypothesized that it is not rigid and may be influenced by other face dimensions, most notably the face’s gender. Infants are sensitive to the gender of faces; for example, 3-month-olds rais...

We examined whether Asian individuals would show differential sensitivity to configural vs. featural changes to own- and other-race faces and whether such sensitivity would depend on whether the changes occurred in the upper vs. lower regions of the faces. We systematically varied the size of key facial features (eyes and mouth) of own-race Asian f...

Infants can form object categories based on perceptual cues, but their ability to form categories based on differential experience is less clear. Here we examined whether infants filter through perceptual differences among faces from different other-race classes and represent them as a single other-race class different only from own-race faces. We...

Angry faces are perceived as more masculine by adults. However, the developmental course and underlying mechanism (bottom-up stimulus driven or top-down belief driven) associated with the angry-male bias remain unclear. Here we report that anger biases face gender categorization toward “male” responding in children as young as 5–6 years. The bias i...

The present study examined whether perceptual individuation training with other-race faces could reduce preschool children's implicit racial bias. We used an ‘angry = outgroup’ paradigm to measure Chinese children's implicit racial bias against African individuals before and after training. In Experiment 1, children between 4 and 6 years were prese...

In a standard center cueing paradigm, participants are asked to identify a target object presented either to the left or the right of a center cue (e.g., eye gaze, head-turn, arrow, etc.). When the center cue is non-predictive (e.g., the arrow points to the correct location of the target only 50 % of the time), the target can still be identified fa...

Background / Purpose: We explored the offer-race effect (ORE) in face processing by testing upper vs. lower face information change detection. Participants showed higher sensitivity for both configural and featural information in their own- than other-race faces in upper face but not in lower face. Main conclusion: Both configual and featural...

IN THE CURRENT STUDY, WE EXAMINED HOW COLOR KNOWLEDGE IN A DOMAIN OF EXPERTISE INFLUENCES THE ACCURACY AND SPEED OF OBJECT RECOGNITION: In Experiment 1, expert bird-watchers and novice participants categorized common birds (e.g., robin, sparrow, cardinal) at the family level of abstraction. The bird images were shown in their natural congruent colo...

From the beginning of life, face and language processing are crucial for establishing social communica-tion. Studies on the development of systems for processing faces and language have yielded such similarities as per-ceptual narrowing across both domains. In this article, we review several functions of human communication, and then describe how t...

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show deficits in their ability to produce facial expressions. In this study, a group of children with ASD and IQ-matched, typically developing (TD) children were trained to produce "happy" and "angry" expressions with the FaceMaze computer game. FaceMaze uses an automated computer recognition system that...

The goal of the current study was to investigate the development of face processing strategies in a perceptual discrimination task. Children (7-12years of age) and young adults were administered the Face Dimensions Task. In the Face Dimensions Task, participants were asked to judge whether two simultaneously presented faces were the "same" or "diff...

Given that all faces share the same set of features-two eyes, a nose, and a mouth-that are arranged in similar configuration, recognition of a specific face must depend on our ability to discern subtle differences in its featural and configural properties. An enduring question in the face-processing literature is whether featural or configural info...

Implicit attitudes about social groups persist independently of explicit beliefs and can influence not only social behavior, but also medical and legal practices. Although examples presented in the laboratory can alter such implicit attitudes, it is unclear whether the same influence is exerted by real-world exemplars. Following the 2008 US electio...

In this paper, we argue that our ability to recognize own-race faces can be treated as a form of perceptual expertise. Similar to object experts (e.g., birdwatchers), people differentiate own-race faces at the subordinate level of categorization. In contrast, like novices, we tend to classify other-race faces at the basic level of race. We demonstr...

In 2010 Thompson reported a "fat face thin" illusion that, when next to an inverted face, an upright face looks "fatter". Sun et al (2012 Perception 41 117-120) observed that one of the faces need not be inverted for the illusion to emerge: when two identical faces are presented one above the other, the face at the bottom appears "fatter" than the...

Facial expressions are not perceived in isolation, but are embedded in a complex perceptual and social environment. Contextual factors, such as body gesture and emotional scene, have been shown to influence the processes of expression recognition. However, it is not known how objects affect the speed at which a facial expression is recognized. In t...

The other-race effect (ORE) in face recognition refers to better recognition memory for faces of one's own race than faces of another race-a common phenomenon among individuals living in primarily mono-racial societies. In this article, we review findings suggesting that early visual and sociocultural experiences shape one's processing of familiar...

Recent research has been investigating how infants’ face processing is tuned by experience with different classes of faces early in development. The research reveals that different degrees of exposure to gender and race categories impacts how infants (1) organize faces into different social groupings, and (2) attend to and recognize individual face...

The present study examined developmental changes in the ability to recognize face parts. In Experiment 1, participants were familiarized with whole faces and given a recognition test with old and new eyes, noses, mouths, inner faces, outer faces, or whole faces. Adults were above chance in their recognition of the eye and mouth regions. However, ch...

Three- to 7-month-olds were administered a house version of the Face Dimensions Test in which the featural and configural information of the upper and lower windows were systematically varied. The Dimensions Test has previously been used to study the processing of face features and their configurations by infants (Quinn & Tanaka, 2009). Just as was...

Background: Although impaired social-emotional ability is a hallmark of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the perceptual skills and mediating strategies contributing to the social deficits of autism are not well understood. A perceptual skill that is fundamental to effective social communication is the ability to accurately perceive and interpret fa...

Background / Purpose: We report a series of experiments to investigate a novel fat face illusion: when two identical images of the same face are aligned vertically, the face at the bottom appears “fatter” than the top one. Main conclusion: This fat face illusion emerges only when the two faces are presented upright, but not when inverted. The...

Perceptual narrowing in the visual, auditory, and multisensory domains has its developmental origins during infancy. The current study shows that experimentally induced experience can reverse the effects of perceptual narrowing on infants' visual recognition memory of other-race faces. Caucasian 8- to 10-month-olds who could not discriminate betwee...

In the face literature, it is debated whether the identification of facial expressions requires holistic (i.e., whole face) or analytic (i.e., parts-based) information. In this study, happy and angry composite expressions were created in which the top and bottom face halves formed either an incongruent (e.g., angry top + happy bottom) or congruent...

We report a novel fat face illusion that when two identical images of the same face are aligned vertically, the face at the bottom appears 'fatter'. This illusion emerged when the faces were shown upright, but not inverted, with the size of the illusion being 4%. When the faces were presented upside down, the illusion did not emerge. Also, when upr...

A prominent theory of the N2 event-related potential component holds that the 'oddball' N2 is generated in the anterior cingulate cortex. However, observations of oddball N2s with posterior scalp distributions are inconsistent with this hypothesis. We suggest that variability in the topology of the oddball N2 is a key characteristic of the componen...

In this paper, we discuss the role of name labels in facial recognition, arguing that the function of a proper name is to direct the level of specificity at which a face is perceived. First, we discuss the expertise hypothesis of face recognition in which the face is identified at the specific, subordinate level of the individual. This research has...

This article reviews the development of the face-processing system from birth, during infancy and through childhood, until it becomes the sophisticated system observed in adults. We begin by discussing the following major theoretical issues concerning the development of face expertise: (1) nature versus nurture or the role of experience in face pro...

Studies employing event-related potentials have shown that when participants are monitoring for a novel target face, the presentation of their own face elicits an enhanced negative brain potential in posterior channels approximately 250 ms after stimulus onset. Here, we investigate whether the own face N250 effect generalizes to other highly famili...

People are generally better at recognizing faces from their own race than from a different race, as has been shown in numerous behavioral studies. Here we use event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how differences between own-race and other-race faces influence the neural correlates of memory encoding and recognition. ERPs of Asian and Cauc...

While much developmental research has focused on the strategies that children employ to recognize faces, less is known about the principles governing the organization of face exemplars in perceptual memory. In this study, we tested a novel, child-friendly paradigm for investigating the organization of face, bird and car exemplars. Children ages 3-4...

Experience plays a crucial role in the development of the face processing system. At 6 months of age infants can discriminate individual faces from their own and other races. By 9 months of age this ability to process other-race faces is typically lost, due to minimal experience with other-race faces, and vast exposure to own-race faces, for which...

Although previous research in ERPs has focused on the conditions under which faces are recognized, less research has focused on the process by which face representations are acquired and maintained. In Experiment 1, participants were required to monitor for a target "Joe" face that was shown among a series of nontarget "Other" faces. At the halfway...

In a recent study (Brooks and Gwinn, 2010 Perception 39 1142-1145), the lightness contrast illusion was employed to study the influences of skin tone and facial morphology on race perception. The findings were rather counterintuitive: they suggested that skin tone does not play a major role in racial categorisation. To investigate this further, we...

A comparison of the literatures on how infants represent generic object classes, gender and race information in faces, and emotional expressions reveals both common and distinctive developments in the three domains. In addition, the review indicates that some very basic questions remain to be answered regarding how infants represent facial displays...

This study explores the effect of individuation training on the acquisition of race-specific expertise. First, we investigated whether practice individuating other-race faces yields improvement in perceptual discrimination for novel faces of that race. Second, we asked whether there was similar improvement for novel faces of a different race for wh...

This research examines the effects of prosopagnosia on the processing of featural and configural information in faces. Featural and configural information was manipulated in a face matching task by incrementally varying the size and distance of the eyes and mouth features respectively. In a control study with visually normal adults, the featural an...

All faces are created equal in the sense that each face shares the same set of features of two eyes, a nose and a mouth that are arranged in a similar configuration. Given their common parts and spatial layout, recognition of a specific face must therefore depend on our ability to discern subtle differences in the featural and configural properties...

Same-race faces are easier to remember than other-race faces, a phenomenon known in the literature as the “other-race effect”. We investigated whether Caucasian participants use the same visual information when processing Caucasian and African-American faces using Bubbles (Gosselin & Schyns, 2001). We asked five participants to learn face-name asso...

Successful social behavior requires the accurate detection of other people's movements. Consistent with this, typical observers demonstrate enhanced visual sensitivity to human movement relative to equally complex, nonhuman movement [e.g., Pinto & Shiffrar, 2009]. A psychophysical study investigated visual sensitivity to human motion relative to ob...

An emerging body of evidence indicates that relative to typically developing children, children with autism are selectively impaired in their ability to recognize facial identity. A critical question is whether face recognition skills can be enhanced through a direct training intervention. In a randomized clinical trial, children diagnosed with aut...

Visual perception can be influenced by top-down processes related to the observer's goals and expectations, as well as by bottom-up processes related to low-level stimulus attributes, such as luminance, contrast, and spatial frequency. When using different physical stimuli across psychological conditions, one faces the problem of disentangling the...

Adults are often better at recognising own-race than other-race faces. Unlike previous studies that reported an own-race advantage after administering a single test of either holistic processing or of featural and relational processing, we used a cross-over design and multiple tasks to assess differential processing of faces from a familiar race ve...

What is the information mediating race categorization? Mangini & Biederman (2004; see also Konsevitch & Tyler, 2004) have recently proposed an original application of the reverse-correlation technique in which the base stimulus (i.e. the stimulus on which the decision is done) is ambiguous with respect to the task at hand (e.g. in a task where the...

In a standard demonstration of holistic face processing, differences in an irrelevant feature (e.g., mouth) change the perceptual representation of a relevant feature (e.g., eyes). Unfortunately, this simple demonstration cannot reveal the nature of the perceptual representation derived from holistic processing. We made use of a set of face stimuli...

It has been claimed that identification of a face relies more on the perception of the whole face than the perception of its constituent parts (e.g., eyes, nose, mouth). The face inversion, face composite, and parts/wholes tasks are well-established paradigms demonstrating the holistic perception of facial identity. However, less is known about the...

In a category learning task, people are initially unaware when they have committed an error and therefore, require corrective feedback to modify their category decisions. Once the categories are learned, however, external feedback is no longer necessary. Electrophysiologically, the two phases of category learning are indicated by different event-re...

Adults' expert face recognition is better for the kinds of faces they encounter on a daily basis (typically upright human faces of the same race). Adults process own-race faces holistically (i.e., as a gestalt) and are sensitive to small differences among faces in the spacing of features and in the appearance of individual features. Various tasks a...

The authors examined spatial frequency (SF) tuning of upright and inverted face identification using an SF variant of the Bubbles technique (F. Gosselin & P. G. Schyns, 2001). In Experiment 1, they validated the SF Bubbles technique in a plaid detection task. In Experiments 2a-c, the SFs used for identifying upright and inverted inner facial featur...

Adults' expertise in face recognition relies upon holistic processing. When a stimulus is detected as a face, its parts become integrated into a whole or Gestalt-like representation, making information about individual features less accessible. A compelling demonstration is the whole/part advantage: adults are much better at recognizing the feature...

Discrimination and recognition are often poorer for other-race than own-race faces. These other-race effects (OREs) have traditionally been attributed to reduced perceptual expertise, resulting from more limited experience, with other-race faces. However, recent findings suggest that sociocognitive factors, such as reduced motivation to individuate...

To elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying the development of perceptual expertise, we recorded ERPs while participants performed a categorization task. We found that as participants learned to discriminate computer generated "blob" stimuli, feedback modulated the amplitude of the error-related negativity (ERN)-an ERP component thought to reflec...

Three- to 4-month-old and 6- to 7-month-old infants were administered an infant version of the Face Dimensions Test that has been used with adults (e.g., Bukach, Le Grand, Kaiser, Bub, & Tanaka, 2008). Infants were familiarized with a photograph of a woman's face and then tested with the familiar face paired with a face differing in the (a) distanc...

A set of face stimuli called the NimStim Set of Facial Expressions is described. The goal in creating this set was to provide facial expressions that untrained individuals, characteristic of research participants, would recognize. This set is large in number, multiracial, and available to the scientific community online. The results of psychometric...