Effect of the Muslim Headscarf on Face Perception. A series of psychological experiments looking at how the Muslim headscarf influences the perception of (South Asian) faces.

摘要

The Muslim headscarf conceals the hair and other external features of a face. For this reasonudit may have implications for the recognition of such faces. The experiments reported in thisudthesis aimed to investigate anecdotal reports, which suggested that headscarf wearing femalesudare more difficult to recognise. This was done by employing a series of experiments whichudinvolved a yes/no recognition task. The stimuli that were used were images of South Asianudfemales who were photographed wearing a Muslim headscarf (HS), with their own hairudvisible (H), and a third set of stimuli were produced in which their external features wereudcropped (CR). Most importantly, participants either took part in the condition in which theudstate of the external features remained the same between the learning and test stage (Same) orudthe condition in which they were switched between the two stages (Switch). In oneudexperiment participants completed a Social Contact Questionnaire. Surprisingly, in the Sameudcondition, there was no difference in the recognition rates of faces that were presented withudhair, with headscarf, or cropped faces. However, participants in the Switch conditionudperformed significantly worse than those in the Same condition. It was also found that thereudwas no difference in the % of fixations to the external features between the Same and Switchudcondition, which implied that the drop in performance between the two conditions was notudmediated by eye-movements. These results suggest that the internal and external features ofuda face are processed interactively and, although the external features were not fixated on, audmanipulation to them caused a drop in performance. This was confirmed in a separateudexperiment in which participants were unable to ignore the external features when they wereudasked to judge the similarity of the internal features of pairs of faces. Pairs of headscarf facesudwere rated as being more similar compared to pairs of faces with hair. Finally, for one groupudof participants it was found that contact with headscarf-wearing females was positivelyudcorrelated with the recognition of headscarf-wearing faces. It was concluded that theudheadscarf per se did not impair face recognition and that there is enough information in theudinternal features of a face for optimal recognition, however, performance was disrupted whenudthe presence or absence of the headscarf was manipulated.