Premium
Which twin are you? A demonstration of induced categorical perception of identical twin faces
Author(s) -
Stevenage Sarah V.
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1998.tb02672.x
Subject(s) - categorization , psychology , perception , categorical variable , cognitive psychology , task (project management) , categorical perception , wonder , point (geometry) , visual perception , social psychology , artificial intelligence , computer science , speech perception , mathematics , geometry , neuroscience , economics , management , machine learning
The faces of twins present us with a very complex visual task. How do we get from the stage of being unable to distinguish between the twins, to being able to identify each twin correctly and readily by name? Does the actual process of learning to distinguish between the twins make us change the way we see them? Recent literature has demonstrated such an effect of categorization on perception in what has come to be known as categorical perception (Harnad, 1987). Evidence is available for the categorical perception of stimuli belonging to categories of which we are innately aware (see Etcoff & Magee, 1992), but the labelling of individuals by name is arbitrary and is something we must learn. The present paper reports two experiments which provide converging evidence that categorical perception can be induced for previously unfamiliar categories through training. After training, photographs of the same twin appeared more similar to one another and photographs of the different twins appeared less similar to one another compared to ratings obtained before training. This shift in perception may help us explain how our processing of twin faces can reach a point at which we wonder how we ever confused them.