Summary: Facial expressions influence the memory color effect, with angry and fearful faces being affected more strongly than neutral faces. Participants perceived the achromatic angry and fearful faces as reddish-yellow, suggesting that the expression affects color memory.
This research highlights how emotion and color memory are linked. Future studies aim to investigate attention to different facial expressions and colors.
Key facts:
- Angry and fearful faces affect memory color more than neutral faces.
- Participants saw achromatic angry and fearful faces as red-yellow.
- Research published in Journal of Vision on 31 May 2024.
Source: HERE
The link between facial expression 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 at Toyohashi University of Technology.
Color memory effect refers to the phenomenon in which knowledge of the typical color of a particular object (memory color) affects 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 memory color effect compared to neutral faces, and that memory colors differed between expressions.
The results of this study were published online in Journal of Vision on 31 May 2024.
Details
The face is an important feature for recognizing individuals, and as Japanese phrases such as “kaoiro wo ukagau” (Look at the complexion, i.e. be sensitive to someone’s mood, read someone’s face) show, facial color plays a key role in reading a person’s emotions.
Recent research has shown that facial color alters individual judgments of expressions, with for example a flushed face tending to be perceived as angry, even when presented with faces with the same features.
However, it was not well understood whether everyday memories of face colors or memory colors formed from knowledge of the typical colors of specific objects also differ between expressions.
The research team therefore focused on the phenomenon in which color recognition changes according to memory colors, known as the color memory effect, and used facial images with different expressions and colors to conduct a psychophysical experiment.
Participants in the experiment were asked to choose which color the face was from two options (“typical color” and “opposite color”) for face pictures that were presented to them.
Typical color means the color that the observer holds as knowledge about the object and in the case of faces it refers to the color of the skin, among other things. An opposite color refers to a color placed 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 with different colors. The experiment was conducted in a dimly lit room maintained at a constant brightness, thereby mitigating the effect of ambient brightness on color appearance.
The results of the experiment showed that angry and fearful faces, which were actually achromatic (gray), tended to appear reddish-yellow, their typical color, more than achromatic neutral faces.
Since red-yellow, the memory color for angry and fearful faces, has a higher saturation than for neutral faces, it is possible that the achromatic face color may have tended to appear colored by the typical color.
This is similar to reports from previous research that expressions introduce bias into remembered face color, and the recalled face color was red-yellow with a higher saturation than when actually observed.
Yuya Hasegawa, a first-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and lead author of the study, explains, “In general, the color that evokes anger is red, and red is also often used to express anger. In that case, then, do people regularly and empirically remember angry faces as redder than neutral faces?
“We hypothesized that if people change the color of faces during memory depending on their expression, the memory color should be different for each expression, which inspired this study.”
Future prospectuses
These results are the first to reveal that expressions affect faces at the memory color level. Memory and attention are closely related.
In the future, we will test whether attention tends to go to “red angry faces” over normal angry faces or red neutral faces and explore how to further our understanding of the mechanisms by which remembered face color varies by expression. .
Thanks
This research was supported by JSPS-in-Aid for Scientific Research Grants JP22K17987, JP20H05956 and JP20H04273.
About this facial expression and memory research news
Author: Shino Okazaki
Source: HERE
Contact: Shino Okazaki – TUT
Picture: Image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Facial Expressions Affect Face Color Memory” by Hasegawa, Y et al. Journal of Vision
Abstract
Facial expression affects the memory of face colors
Facial color affects the perception of facial expressions, and emotional expressions distort the way facial color is remembered. However, it remains unclear whether facial expressions influence daily face color memory.
The color memory effect shows that knowledge of typical colors affects the perception of the actual color of given objects. To examine the face color memory effect, we examined whether the color memory effect for faces varied depending on the facial expression.
We calculated the subjective achromatic point of the facial expression visual stimulus and compared the amount by which it shifted from the true achromatic point between the facial expression conditions.
We hypothesized that if memory for face color is affected by the color of the facial expression (eg, anger is a warm color, fear is a cold color), then the subjective achromatic point would vary with facial expression.
In Experiment 1, we recruited 13 participants who adjusted the color of the facial expression stimuli (anger, neutral, and fear) and the banana stimulus to be achromatic.
No significant differences in subjective achromatic point were observed between facial expressions. We subsequently conducted Experiment 2 with 23 participants because Experiment 1 did not consider sensitivity to facial color changes; people perceive greater color differences in faces than in non-faces.
Participants chose what color face they believed the expression stimulus appeared to be and chose one of the two options provided.
The results showed that the subjective achromatic points of angry and fearful faces shifted significantly toward the opposite color direction compared to neutral faces in the short presentation condition.
This research suggests that the memory color of faces differs depending on facial expressions and supports the idea that the perception of emotional expressions can bias the memory of face colors.