Experimental Psychology (Russia)
2015. Vol. 8, no. 4, 45–60
doi:10.17759/exppsy.2015080404
ISSN: 2072-7593 / 2311-7036 (online)
A new attempt to discover the covert recognition of faces
Abstract
The article describes an experiment which used a new methodological approach to the study of covert recognition of faces by means of registration electro-dermal activity under short-term exposure of familiar and unfamiliar faces and the backward facelike masking stimulus. In contrast to previous studies the control of stimulus awareness allows us to evaluate not just the correct recognitions, but false alarms too. We used as the familiar faces not faces of the well-known persons, but faces of persons from the inner circle of subjects, including the subject’s own face. We confirmed the hypothesis that the characteristics of the electro-dermal reactions in response to familiar and unfamiliar faces will not be different in subjects with a high level of false alarms. However, for the group of subjects with practically zero false alarm rate and zero discriminability of familiar and unfamiliar faces an analysis of electro-dermal reactions have been mixed. On the one hand, as analysis on a group level showed, nor electrocutaneous reactions frequency, nor their amplitudes were not significantly different for the familiar and unfamiliar faces. On the other hand, it is clearly that these individual median and mean values of the amplitudes of subject's reactions are in average more than 2 times stronger when viewed familiar faces than viewed unfamiliar ones. These results leave a good chance to prove the effect of covert identification of faces in further experimentation with other groups of subjects
General Information
Keywords: subliminal perception, covert recognition of faces, electro-dermal reactions, backward masking, false alarms
Journal rubric: Psychophysiology
Article type: scientific article
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17759/exppsy.2015080404
For citation: Meshcheryakov B.G., Nazarov A.I., Chesnokova L.G., Yushchenkova D.V. A new attempt to discover the covert recognition of faces. Eksperimental'naâ psihologiâ = Experimental Psychology (Russia), 2015. Vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 45–60. DOI: 10.17759/exppsy.2015080404. (In Russ., аbstr. in Engl.)
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