INTERRELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE FACIAL EXPRESSION AND FAMILIARITY - ANALYSIS USING SPATIAL-FILTERING AND INVERTED PRESENTATION

We investigated interrelationship between the facial expression and fa miliarity using spatial filtering and inverted presentation. The stimu li were facial images (smiling and neutral faces) band-pass filtered i n the spatial domain. If the filtering is carried out at low spatial f requencies, the images convey more global features than the local ones , whereas the local features are emphasized in the images filtered at high frequencies. The task of subjects was to judge the expression (Ex periment 1) or familiarity (Experiment 2) of such images, which were p resented in the upright or inverted orientation. The following results were obtained. 1) Spatial frequency components in the middle range (1 2.4 and 24.8 cycles/face-width) were important in recognizing both exp ression and familiarity, 2) there was close relationship between the f acial expression and familiarity, and 3) smiling faces were harder to recognize when they are shown in the inverted orientation. These resul ts suggest that there are the common and different recognition process es between facial expression and familiarity.