Open AccessTesting additivity of kinship information in complementary facial regions
Author(s) -
Laurence T. Maloney,
Maria F. Dal Martello
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of vision
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.126
H-Index - 113
ISSN - 1534-7362
DOI - 10.1167/15.12.157
Subject(s) - kinship , kin recognition , psychology , face (sociological concept) , facial recognition system , communication , pattern recognition (psychology) , social psychology , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , evolutionary biology , biology , linguistics , philosophy , political science , law
Allocentric kin recognition - recognition that individuals are close genetic relatives - plays an important role in social organization and kin selection (Hamilton, 1964). Facial judgments - including kin recognition - are typically modeled as a form of cue combination but with the identity of cues currently unknown. In two experiments, we examined human ability to classify pairs of children as siblings or not siblings and tested whether kinship information in different facial regions combined as statistically independent cues. We used complementary masks to occlude a face region or present it in isolation (Exp. 1 eye region; Exp. 2: mouth region) and tested whether we could predict performance with the unmasked face from performance in the two masked conditions