Biomedical subjects

Pawan Sinha

Publications and source records attributed to Pawan Sinha.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2003

The role of eyebrows in face recognition.

A fundamental challenge in face recognition lies in determining which facial characteristics are important in the identification of faces. Several studies have indicated the significance of certain facial features in this regard, particularly internal ones such as the eyes and mouth. Surprisingly, however, one rather prominent facial feature has received little attention in this domain: the eyebrows. Past work has examined the role of eyebrows in emotional expression and nonverbal communication, as well as in facial aesthetics and sexual dimorphism. However, it has not been made clear whether the eyebrows play an important role in the identification of faces. Here, we report experimental results which suggest that for face recognition the eyebrows may be at least as influential as the eyes. Specifically, we find that the absence of eyebrows in familiar faces leads to a very large and significant disruption in recognition performance. In fact, a significantly greater decrement in face recognition is observed in the absence of eyebrows than in the absence of eyes. These results may have important implications for our understanding of the mechanisms of face recognition in humans as well as for the development of artificial face-recognition systems.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Effects of early experience on children's recognition of facial displays of emotion.

The present research examines visual perception of emotion in both typical and atypical development. To examine the processes by which perceptual mechanisms become attuned to the contingencies of affective signals in the environment, the authors measured the sequential, content-based properties of feature detection in emotion recognition processes. To evaluate the role of experience, they compared typically developing children with physically abused children, who were presumed to have experienced high levels of threat and hostility. As predicted, physically abused children accurately identified facial displays of anger on the basis of less sensory input than did controls, which suggests that physically abused children have facilitated access to representations of anger. The findings are discussed in terms of experiential processes in perceptual learning.

Child↗

PubMed2002

Recognizing complex patterns.

How the brain recognizes complex patterns in the environment is a central, but little understood question in neuroscience. The problem is of great significance for a host of applications such as biometric-based access control, autonomous robots and content-based information management. Although some headway in these directions has been made, the current artificial systems do not match the robustness and versatility of their biological counterparts. Here I examine recognition tasks drawn from two different sensory modalities--face recognition and speaker/speech recognition. The goal is to characterize the present state of artificial recognition technologies for these tasks, the influence of neuroscience on the design of these systems and the key challenges they face.

Animals↗

PubMed2002

'United' we stand.

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

Facial Expression↗

PubMed2002

Contribution of color to face recognition.

One of the key challenges in face perception lies in determining how different facial attributes contribute to judgments of identity. In this study, we focus on the role of color cues. Although color appears to be a salient attribute of faces, past research has suggested that it confers little recognition advantage for identifying people. Here we report experimental results suggesting that color cues do play a role in face recognition and their contribution becomes evident when shape cues are degraded. Under such conditions, recognition performance with color images is significantly better than that with gray-scale images. Our experimental results also indicate that the contribution of color may lie not so much in providing diagnostic cues to identity as in aiding low-level image-analysis processes such as segmentation.

Adolescent↗