Debbie Ma
California State University-Northridge, CA·Psychology
People size up others from their faces within moments. Adults quickly sort faces by sex, age and race, and they infer many traits from facial features.
- Fields
Psychology
Social Science
Computer Science
- Topics
Chicago Face Database
face perception
face processing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Expand the Chicago Face Database with 200 standardized images of people photographed in China and Japan, adding to its existing set of over 800 faces.
- Update subjective ratings of the faces and collect more complete physical measurements of facial features, to improve the database as a validated stimulus resource.
- Investigate the cross-race recognition deficit, the tendency to recognize own-race faces better than other-race faces, using the expanded set of diverse face stimuli.
- Build web-based tools that help researchers access the database and select face stimuli, developed with underrepresented computer science students in a mentoring program.
More about the research
To study how people process faces and how this shapes behavior, researchers need high-quality, carefully validated face images. The Chicago Face Database fills that need. It provides free, standardized face photographs of over 800 Asian, Black, Latinx, multiracial and White Americans and South Asian Indians, along with ratings and physical measurements of each face. Since its release in 2015, it has been downloaded more than 8,000 times and cited more than 1,400 times in psychology, computer science and economics.
Why it matters
Researchers who study face perception, social judgment and bias could use a larger, more diverse and easier-to-use set of free face images. That supports more rigorous and comparable studies. The work could also clarify why people recognize faces of other races less accurately, a gap relevant to eyewitness identification and everyday social interaction.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Benjamin Balas
North Dakota State University, ND·Psychology
Test whether children aged 5–12 become better at seeing faces in noise images that match natural image statistics than in images with unnatural statistics.
Jasmin Cloutier
University of Delaware, DE·Psychology
Compare brain activity, measured with functional MRI, while people form first impressions of human versus artificial intelligence (AI) partners.
Desmond Ong
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Computer Science·Early-career
Define types of emotional reasoning, such as predicting emotions from situations and mental states and reasoning about interventions that change emotions, drawing on psychological theory.
The school
California State University-Northridge: 4 labs on PI Pages, $27M a year on research, 11 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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