Date of Award
4-17-2017
Document Type
Capstone
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Keith Gora
Second Advisor
Season Ellison
Third Advisor
Angela Fournier
Abstract
The face inversion effect is one of the most studied phenomena in facial recognition. The purpose of this thesis was is to determine if heart rate measures of attention and cognition might provide an explanation for the inverted face effect. Participants received a face memory task and heart rate was measured throughout the experiment. It was hypothesized that heart rate would change the most when processing inverted faces compared to upright, because of the increased task difficulty. Each participant experienced one of four conditions differing on face orientation presented during the learning phase (either upright or inverted) and face orientation presented in the testing phase (either upright or inverted). Also during the testing phase, participants received some familiar faces (old) from the learning phase as well as some novel (new) faces they had not seen before. No significant differences were found in heart rate for learning orientation, or while viewing upright faces or inverted faces when compared to baseline heart rate. The combined comparisons revealed that the combination of upright and inverted, and old and new faces all appeared to be experienced similarly. No interaction of learning phase orientation, testing phase orientation, and old vs. new during testing phase approached any significance. A significant interaction was found for learning and testing orientation. Future research should consider the limitations of this study and use a larger, more diverse sample. More research is needed to discern the physiological impact from the face inversion effect.
Recommended Citation
Walker-O’Beirne, Whitney L., "Heart Rate and Face Inversion Effect" (2017). Honors Capstones. 19.
https://pines.bemidjistate.edu/honors-cap/19
