Summary: Facial expressions influence the memory color effect, with angry and fearful faces being more strongly affected than neutral faces. Participants perceived angry and fearful achromatic faces as red-yellow, indicating that expression impacts color memory.
This research highlights how emotions and memory color are interconnected. Future studies aim to explore attention to different facial expressions and colors.
Highlights:
- Angry and fearful faces influence memory color more than neutral faces.
- Participants saw achromatic angry and fearful red-yellow faces.
- Research published in Vision Journal on May 31, 2024.
Source: TUT
The association between facial expressions and the memory color effect was elucidated through a collaborative effort involving the Cognitive Neurotechnology Unit and the Visual Perception and Cognition Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Toyohashi University of Technology.
The memory color effect refers to the phenomenon in which knowledge of the typical color of a specific object (the memory color) influences the recognition of its actual color.
This study showed that angry and fearful faces were more strongly affected in terms of color recognition due to the color memory effect compared to neutral faces and that memory colors varied across expressions.
The results of this study were published online in the Vision Journal on May 31, 2024.
Details
The face is an important feature for recognizing individuals, and as demonstrated by Japanese expressions such as “kaoiro wo ukagau” (Look at the complexion; that is, be sensitive to someone’s mood, read someone’s face), facial color plays a key role in recognizing individuals. read a person’s emotions.
Recent research has shown that facial color alters the judgment of an individual’s expressions, with a reddish face tending to be seen as a sign of anger, for example, even when faces with the same characteristics are presented.
However, it has not been well understood whether everyday memories of facial colors or remembered colors formed by knowledge of typical colors of specific objects also vary between expressions.
Therefore, the research team focused on the phenomenon in which color recognition changes based on memory colors, known as the memory color effect, and used facial images with different expressions and colors to conduct a psychophysical experiment.
Experimental participants were asked to select the color of a face from two options (the “typical color” and the “opposite color”) for the facial images presented to them.
Typical color designates the color that the observer has as knowledge of the object and refers, among other things, to the color of the skin in the case of faces. Opposite color refers to the color that is opposite the typical color in terms of hue.
The experiment used three expression images with an angry face, a neutral face, and a fearful face in different colors. The experiment was carried out in a dimly lit room maintained at a constant brightness, thereby mitigating the influence of ambient brightness on color appearance.
The results of the experiment showed that angry and fearful faces that were actually achromatic (gray) tended to appear more red-yellow, their typical color, than achromatic neutral faces.
Because red-yellow, the memory color of angry and fearful faces, has higher saturation than that of neutral faces, it is possible that the achromatic face color tended to appear colored with the typical color.
This is similar to previous research reports that expressions introduced a bias in remembered face color, and the recalled face color was a red-yellow with higher saturation than when it was actually observed.
Yuya Hasegawa, a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and lead author of this study, explains: “Typically, the color that anger evokes is red, and red is also often used to express anger. . If so, do people then consistently and empirically remember angry faces as being redder than neutral faces?
“We hypothesized that if people changed the color of faces based on their expression when they remembered it, the memory color should differ for each expression, which inspired this study.”
Future prospects
These results are the first to reveal that expressions exert an influence on faces at the level of memorized color. Memory and attention are closely associated.
In the future, we will test whether attention tends to be directed to “angry red faces” rather than normal angry faces or neutral red faces and consider how to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms by which color of the memorized face differs depending on the expression. .
Thanks
This research was supported by JSPS Scientific Research Grants JP22K17987, JP20H05956, and JP20H04273.
About this news on research into facial expressions and memory
Author: Shino Okazaki
Source: TUT
Contact: Shino Okazaki – TUT
Picture: Image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Free access.
“Facial expressions affect facial color memory” by Hasegawa, Y et al. Vision Journal
Abstract
Facial expressions affect facial color memory
Facial color influences the perception of facial expressions, and emotional expressions influence how facial color is remembered. However, whether facial expressions affect everyday facial color memory remains unclear.
The color memory effect demonstrates that knowledge of typical colors affects the perception of the actual color of given objects. To investigate the effect of facial color memory, we examined whether the effect of facial color memory varied as a function of facial expression.
We calculated the subjective achromatic point of the facial expression image stimulus and compared the degree of shift from the actual achromatic point between facial expression conditions.
We hypothesized that if facial color memory is influenced by the color of the facial expression (e.g., anger is a warm color, fear is a cool color), then the subjective achromatic point would vary based on facial expression.
In Experiment 1, we recruited 13 participants who adjusted the color of facial expression stimuli (angry, neutral, and fear) and a banana stimulus to be achromatic.
No significant differences in subjective achromatic point between facial expressions were observed. Subsequently, we conducted Experiment 2 with 23 participants because Experiment 1 did not take into account sensitivity to color changes on the face; humans perceive greater color differences in faces than in non-faces.
Participants selected the facial color that they believed was the expression stimulus, choosing one of two options given to them.
Results indicated that the subjective achromatic dots of angry and fear faces significantly shifted toward the opposite color direction compared to neutral faces in the brief presentation condition.
This research suggests that the remembered color of faces differs depending on facial expressions and supports the idea that the perception of emotional expressions can bias facial color memory.