Imagine that you put your keys on the same table every day when you come home. Logic dictates that you will notice when your housemate has moved the table one day. After all, your brain was predicting where the table would be, based on previous experience. Our brain continuously makes these predictions, including when we see new faces. Depending on the situation, we are expecting to see a face that looks friendly or unfriendly. This kind of prediction mechanism can be very useful in preparing us for situations, but it is by no means always reliable.
Scientist have already concluded that faces influence our ideas about the person behind the face. But do our ideas about a person also affect the way in which we remember a face and can the probability of a distorted image increase or decrease under certain circumstances?
Frown or open expression
“First, I examined the extent to which people create expectations of faces based on what they learn about a person’s behaviour,” says Jansen. She had participants in her experiment read ten statements about the behaviour of a person without knowing the person’s face. One group read mostly negative statements, and the other mostly positive statements. “After reading the positive statements, participants imagined someone with an open expression, big eyes, and with the corners of their mouth turned slightly upward. After reading the negative statements, participants expected a frown, lower eyebrows, and the corners of the mouth turned downward. People thus have a clear expectation of what someone who performed positive or negative behaviour will look like.”
A subtle distortion at times
But are the expectations so strong that they influence the memory of a face even if someone has actually seen that face? Jansen: “We noticed a subtle bias under certain circumstances. In these cases, some participants remembered the face a little differently than how it was shown to them. Note that this was not true under all circumstances. It seems that the stronger the expectation, the larger the probability of a subtle bias. We noticed this, for instance, when participants recalled their overall impression of the person before we measured their memory of the face.” It is therefore too early for strong statements about the influence of someone’s behaviour on the memory of their face. “I used fairly neutral faces. Will the bias also occur if the face already looks very friendly or very unfriendly?”
Being aware of your coloured perception of the world
The bias, although subtle, confirms for Jansen that the predictions that our brains create can influence our view of the world. “Although these are cognitive processes that we usually do not notice, it is important that we are aware of the potential subtle biases in our experiences. Everyone has expectations brought about by their cognitive systems and these expectations can sometimes colour your view of the world. Realizing this may help you understand other people who view things differently than you do.”