Recognizing familiar faces is essential to social functioning, but little is known about how people identify human faces and classify them in terms of familiarity. Face identification involves discriminating familiar faces from unfamiliar faces, whereas face classification involves making an intentional decision to classify faces as "familiar" or "unfamiliar." This study used a directed-lying t...

A study was conducted to evaluate the effects of social familiarity and initial BW variation at mixing on performance and welfare of pigs born to group-housed lactating sows. A total of 180 pigs from 24 litters were used in a random design with 4 treatments in a 2 x 2 (social familiarity x initial BW uniformity) factorial arrangement. Pigs were born in group-farrowing rooms where they mingled i...

Between-farm variation in animal reactions to humans can reflect different management styles and behavioral tendencies among farmers. Animals are well known to discriminate among humans, but less clear is the key issue of whether they more or less easily generalize their experience from specific humans to others depending on management style. Here, we chose 2 contrasted management styles by kno...

To recognize individuals, the brain often integrates audiovisual information from familiar or unfamiliar faces, voices, and auditory names. To date, the effects of the semantic familiarity of stimuli on audiovisual integration remain unknown. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we used familiar/unfamiliar facial images, auditory names, and audiovisual face-name pairs as ...

From a phenomenological perspective, faces are perceived differently from objects as their perception always involves the possibility of a relational engagement (Bredlau, 2011). This is especially true for familiar faces, i.e., faces of people with a history of real relational engagements. Similarly, valence of emotional expressions assumes a key role, as they define the sense and direction of ...