Learning for Carlos

INTRODUCTION

Perceptual Development

The environment influences all individual's perceptual development. The relationship between genetic predisposition versus environmental influence has been widely debated and will continue to be until research reveals findings that sufficiently address the total validity of the current supporting arguments for nature and nurture respectively. Nonetheless, it is clear that some facets of development are to some extent dependent on the nature of the environmental input retrieved by the developing individual.

Human infants are born with certain basic perceptual capacities (i.e. sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste). As the child learns how to exercise these general perceptual skills, available features shape perception by showing the child what structural components to attune to, the consequential meaning each feature carries, and in what way to account for gross and acute variations. According to Goldstone (2000), perceptual learning involves long-lasting changes to an individual's perceptual system facilitating the enhancement of an individual's ability to respond to environmental cues. Such learning leads to the understanding of the relationship between the processes of obtaining sensory information and the utilization of the information for survival and social interaction. Individuals learn to take in environmental information that is "highly salient, frequent, or highly predictable" (Pollak & Kistler 2002). Thus by analyzing the emotions individuals assign based on sensory input, researchers may gain clearer understanding of the manner which well-developed individuals detect stimulus information that most significantly contributes to evaluation of the affective states of the face.

Face Recognition & Categorization

According to Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen (2003), experts on facial emotion, the three facial regions most significant to the expression of emotion are the brow, the eyes/lids, and the mouth. Unless changes congruently occur in all three areas it is not entirely clear what emotion the particular face is expressing. Under the principle of categorical perception, individual exhibit greater sensitivity to physical change when it crosses the midpoint between two perceptual categories than to the same change occurring within a particular category (Goldstone 2000). Therefore, a fundamental issue is whether or not facial emotions vary continuously along certain underlying dimensions or belong to qualitatively discrete categories.

Problem Statement

There has been extensive research done regarding the assignment of categorization of whole faces, looking at whether one feature makes a greater contribution to evaluation of the affective assignment of the face (cited below in the literare review). The proposed study sets to discover which region of the face (the mouth/cheeks, or eyes/eyebrows) contributes greater weight in rating amalgamated faces Happy, Sad or Neutral.

Rationale of Research

In the considering the social value of encountering new people, first impressions, social judgments, eye-witness testimony previous studies show that it is easy to assign emotion when looking at faces (Naqvu & Bechara 2006). However, none have separated happy eyes/eyebrows and mouth/cheeks from sad or neutral eyes/eyebrows and mouths/cheeks or examined whether the mouth has a greater influence on the perception for of emotional expression related to the face.

Since there has been limited research concerning face processing of amalgamated faces and eye-movements, the proposed study aims to establish the locality of face processing to determine which features are the most important cues for emotional recognition.

Statement of the research objectives

The proposed study seeks to test: 1) whether the physical location, i.e. top (eyes and eyebrows) or bottom (mouth and cheeks) half of the face is more crucial to the categorization; 2) whether any particular feature is more likely to influence the categorization over another one; and 3) if there is any interaction between location (top or bottom) and feature (i.e. if top is happy will that more likely be considered happy than if bottom is happy). In addition to the affective assignment of the amalgamated faces, analysis will include measurement to determine whether the effect of the potential co-variants of primacy, recency, duration of the presented stimuli significantly influence the participants selections.

Hypothesis

The