title: Outlining face processing skills of portrait artists: Perceptual experience with faces predicts performance.
abstract: Most humans seem to demonstrate astonishingly high levels of skill in face processing if one considers the sophisticated level of fine-tuned discrimination that face recognition requires. However, numerous studies now indicate that the ability to process faces is not as fundamental as once thought and that performance can range from despairingly poor to extraordinarily high across people. Here we studied people who are super specialists of faces, namely portrait artists, to examine how their specific visual experience with faces relates to a range of face processing skills (perceptual discrimination, short- and longer term recognition). Artists show better perceptual discrimination and, to some extent, recognition of newly learned faces than controls. They are also more accurate on other perceptual tasks (i.e., involving non-face stimuli or mental rotation). By contrast, artists do not display an advantage compared to controls on longer term face recognition (i.e., famous faces) nor on person recognition from other sensorial modalities (i.e., voices). Finally, the face inversion effect exists in artists and controls and is not modulated by artistic practice. Advantages in face processing for artists thus seem to closely mirror perceptual and visual short term memory skills involved in portraiture.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Liège, Belgium; Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab, School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Electronic address: christel.devue@vuw.ac.nz.
authors: Christel
authors: C
authors: Devue
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Liège, Belgium; Cognitive Psychopathology and Neuropsychology Unit, University of Geneva, Switzerland; Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland.
authors: Catherine
authors: C
authors: Barsics
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001154:Art; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D057567:Memory, Long-Term / Q000502:physiology; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Drawing; Face expertise; Face perception; Face recognition; Portrait artists; Visual art; Voice recognition