FACE PERCEPTION

Faces have a central role in our daily lives. A quick look at someone's face is often enough to identify that person and at the same time to infer how they are feeling. Over the last decades, a great deal of research has been performed on how faces are perceived. This research reveals that the first impression made on the basis of the face, influences all sorts of judgements and decisions. Think of relatively innocuous judgements about whether people are attractive, and whether you want to approach someone.

In the RSCL, we contribute to this line of research by studying a wide range of bottom-up and top-down effects in the perception of faces. Does social category membership affect emotion perception and face detection? Does wearing a face mask affect how people categorize emotions? As stimuli, we often make use of the Radboud Faces Database (RaFD), which contains pictures of 67 models (including White males and females, White children, both boys and girls, and Moroccan Dutch males). The RaFD is developed as an initiative of the Behavioural Science Institute of the Radboud University and can be used freely for non-commercial scientific research by researchers who work for an officially accredited university (www.rafd.nl).