Takashi KATO, Masaomi ODA
Indirect Measurement of Feature Saliency
in Face Processing
Abstract:This article introduces a newly devised orienting task and discusses its utility in face processing research. As an example, we present the experimental results obtained in a pilot study investigating feature saliency. In this study, subjects were presented with a series of line-drawn faces and were asked to select 10 of their favorite faces or 10 faces that were most similar to a particular target. The line-drawn faces were randomly selected from a pool of nearly 60,000 different faces, which were drawn by choosing one of 3 possible values for each of 10 facial features (i.e., 310 possible faces). Assuming that the subjects would select the faces with matching values for important features, the relative importance of facial features may be assessed by comparing the amount of variance "tolerated" by the subjects for each feature. It was found, for example, that in similar face retrieval, the variance was significantly smaller for eyebrow tilt, eye shape, and face shape than for other features, such as eyebrow position, eye position, or nose length.
The utility of the present orienting task was discussed in terms of what such experimental results reveal about feature saliency.