L’induction implicite de l’utilisation de l’oeil droit produit une meilleure discrimination faciale du sexe
Variation in face recognition ability is still largely unexplained in the neurologically typical population. We first derived classification images (CI) from the Bubbles sampling technique —regression planes which reveal idiosyncratic visual information usage— for 140 healthy individuals while they conducted a face-sex discrimination task. We found that qualitative differences in the visual information used by participants predicted (i.e. was correlated to) variations of performance between healthy individuals; participants in the best performance quartile relied mostly on the right-eye of the presented face whereas individuals from the worst performance quartile used the left-eye region while performing the same task.  Then, with the aim of going beyond the correlational techniques that have attempted to resolve the issue of recognition ability, we experimentally induced the two visual strategies used by the best and worst individuals to one hundred naive participants and observed the effects of these treatments on individual recognition ability. Data from CIs indicate that we successfully induced right eye usage in fifty individuals. We found that this induction significantly improved the group’s performance on post-induction task sessions, compared to pre-induction, and that this right-eye induction group also improved significantly more than the left-eye induction group. Given that both eye regions have the same informational content, this is the first evidence that the use of a specific facial representation causes better facial processing in the normal population.
Cognitive ability Visual strategies Causality Induction Representations Learning Face-sex recognition Induction Face recognition Individual differences