The Recognition of the Faces Article Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

The Recognition of the Faces - Article Example However, whether skin color is the major contributor for the ORE has not yet been experimentally determined. In this article, the skin color of African and Caucasian faces was manipulated without changing the facial features and face-recognition task was employed to determine whether own-race and other-race recognition depended on skin color or facial features. The research design involved the identification of a set of faces in the initial task and these faces where then manipulated and in the test phase the participants were presented with both the old and new faces and were required to press a key to identify an old and the new face. Recognition of the faces presented constitutes the dependent variable of the study while skin color and facial features are the independent variables. 48 Caucasian students participated in the task and in the initial task they were shown 16 faces in random order. This was followed by the test phase in which the 16 old faces and the 16 new faces were shown again in random order. The total faces presented were 64 chromatic pictures with 16 original African and 16 original Caucasian faces and 16 whitened African and 16 blackened Caucasian faces. All of the faces were obtained from the Tel Aviv face database with females constituting about half of the faces in each category. All the external features of the face s were cropped and the skin color conversion was carried out by extracting the red-green-blue values (RGB) taken from 16 coordinates on each face that was to be converted and they were matched at the same coordinates of the other-race face. This was followed by filtering and color-curve adjustment to complete the color conversion and all the procedures were carried out through Adobe Photoshop CS2 software. The four versions created were presented to each participant only once in the initial study and test phase of the task and each face was shown as either old or new.