Recognition of band-pass filtered facial images: a comparison between perceptual and memory processes

The present study is designed to investigate the selectivity of perceptual and memory processes to the various spatial frequencies. Subjects were asked to rate the similarity of bandpass filtered face stimulus, comparing with the original one. In one case, two stimuli were presented simultaneously side by side (perceptual condition), and in the other case, they were presented successively (memory condition). The results showed that the peak frequency which had been rated the most representative of the original face was 26.9 cycles/image in both perceptual and memory conditions, and there were no significant differences in rated similarity between the two conditions throughout all spatial frequencies. Since linguistic memory might help subjects to retain the details of face, another session which required them to do a linguistic parallel task was carried out. The interference task reduced the similarity scores in the memory condition. However, the effect was consistent across all frequencies, and the peak frequency did not shift at all. Thus, it was suggested that the spatial frequency characteristics of face recognition are probably due to the one of perceptual processing of visual information rather than the visual memory