title: Effects of high-pass and low-pass spatial filtering on face identification.
abstract: If face images are degraded by block averaging, there is a nonlinear decline in recognition accuracy as block size increases, suggesting that identification requires a critical minimum range of object spatial frequencies. The identification of faces was measured with equivalent Fourier low-pass filtering and block averaging preserving the same information and with high-pass transformations. In Experiment 1, accuracy declined and response time increased in a significant nonlinear manner in all cases as the spatial-frequency range was reduced. However, it did so at a faster rate for the quantized and high-passed images. A second experiment controlled for the differences in the contrast of the high-pass faces and found a reduced but significant and nonlinear decline in performance as the spatial-frequency range was reduced. These data suggest that face identification is preferentially supported by a band of spatial frequencies of approximately 8-16 cycles per face; contrast or line-based explanations were found to be inadequate. The data are discussed in terms of current models of face identification.
authors.affiliation: University of Aberdeen, Scotland. costen@hip.atr.co.jp
authors.forename: N P
authors.initials: NP
authors.lastname: Costen
authors.forename: D M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Parker
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Craw
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010469:Perceptual Distortion; D010470:Perceptual Masking