知觉场理论对面孔知觉年龄偏差效应的解释

使用融合面孔范式和倒置面孔范式来研究面孔知觉的年龄偏差效应,检验知觉场能否作为面孔整体加工的指标,并以此发展年龄偏差的整体加工解释。结果发现：（1）成人和儿童在加工正立面孔时的知觉场均大于加工倒置面孔时的知觉场;（2）在加工正立面孔时,成人加工本年龄面孔比加工他年龄面孔的知觉场更大。上述结果表明：（1）知觉场大小可以作为面孔整体加工的指标,且受面孔朝向的影响;（2）知觉场假设可以解释面孔的年龄偏差效应。     

知觉场理论对面孔知觉年龄偏差效应的解释

使用融合面孔范式和倒置面孔范式来研究面孔知觉的年龄偏差效应,检验知觉场能否作为面孔整体加工的指标,并以此发展年龄偏差的整体加工解释。结果发现：（1）成人和儿童在加工正立面孔时的知觉场均大于加工倒置面孔时的知觉场;（2）在加工正立面孔时,成人加工本年龄面孔比加工他年龄面孔的知觉场更大。上述结果表明：（1）知觉场大小可以作为面孔整体加工的指标,且受面孔朝向的影响;（2）知觉场假设可以解释面孔的年龄偏差效应。     

The influence of divided attention on holistic face perception.

There is evidence that upright, but not inverted, faces are encoded holistically. The holistic coding of faces was examined in four experiments by manipulating the attention allocated to target faces. In Experiment 1, participants in a divided attention condition were asked to match two upright flanker faces while encoding a centrally presented upright target face. Although holistic coding was evident in the full attention conditions, dividing attention disrupted holistic coding of target faces. In Experiment 2, we found that while matching upright flanker faces disrupted holistic coding, matching inverted flanker faces did not. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the differential effects of flanker orientation were not due to participants taking longer to match upright, than inverted, flanker faces. In Experiment 4, we found that matching fractured faces had an intermediate effect to that of matching upright and inverted flankers, on the holistic coding of the target faces. The findings emphasize the differences in processing of upright, fractured and inverted faces and suggest that there are limitations in the number of faces that can be holistically coded in a brief time.     

The role of holistic face processing in acquired prosopagnosia: evidence from the composite face effect

Faces are processed more holistically than other objects, and it has been suggested that the loss of holistic face processing causes acquired prosopagnosia. Support for this hypothesis comes from several cases who failed to show holistic face effects as well as the absence of reports of prosopagnosics with unequivocally normal holistic face perception. The current study examines the relationship between holistic face processing and prosopagnosia by testing seven acquired prosopagnosics with the face composite task, a classic measure of holistic face processing. To enhance the robustness of the findings, each prosopagnosic was tested with two versions of the composite task showing upright faces. We also tested an inverted condition to exclude the possibility that more general factors account for composite effects for upright faces. Four of the seven acquired prosopagnosic participants showed consistent upright face composite effects with minimal inverted face composite effects. We conclude that severe face processing deficits can co-occur with intact holistic face processing and that factors other than a loss of holistic processing contribute to the perceptual and recognition deficits in acquired prosopagnosia.     

Recognition of emotion from inverted schematic drawings of faces

The present study investigated whether facial expressions of emotion are recognized holistically, i.e., all at once as an entire unit, as faces are or featurally as other nonface stimuli. Evidence for holistic processing of faces comes from a reliable decrement in recognition performance when faces are presented inverted rather than upright. If emotion is recognized holistically, then recognition of facial expressions of emotion should be impaired by inversion. To test this, participants were shown schematic drawings of faces showing one of six emotions (surprise, sadness, anger, happiness, disgust, and fear) in either an upright or inverted orientation and were asked to indicate the emotion depicted. Participants were more accurate in the upright than in the inverted orientation, providing evidence in support of holistic recognition of facial emotion. Because recognition of facial expressions of emotion is important in social relationships, this research may have implications for treatment of some social disorders.     

A new look at social attention: Orienting to the eyes is not (entirely) under volitional control

People tend to look at other people's eyes, but whether this bias is automatic or volitional is unclear. To discriminate between these two possibilities, we used a "don't look" (DL) paradigm. Participants looked at a series of upright or inverted faces, and were asked either to freely view the faces or to avoid looking at the eyes, or as a control, the mouth. As previously demonstrated, participants showed a bias to attend to both eyes and mouths during free viewing. In the DL condition, participants told to avoid the eyes of upright faces were unable to fully suppress the tendency to fixate on the faces' eyes, whereas participants told to avoid the mouth of upright faces successfully eliminated their bias to overtly attend to that feature. When faces were inverted, participants were equally able to suppress looks to the eyes and mouth. Together, these results suggest that the tendency to look at the eyes reflects orienting that is both volitional and automatic, and that the engagement of holistic or configural face processing mechanisms during upright face viewing has an influence in guiding gaze automatically to the eyes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

When feature information comes first! Early processing of inverted faces

We investigated the early stages of face recognition and the role of featural and holistic face information. We exploited the fact that, on inversion, the alienating disorientation of the eyes and mouth in thatcherised faces is hardly detectable. This effect allows featural and holistic information to be dissociated and was used to test specific face-processing hypotheses. In inverted thatcherised faces, the cardinal features are already correctly oriented, whereas in undistorted faces, the whole Gestalt is coherent but all information is disoriented. Experiment 1 and experiment 3 revealed that, for inverted faces, featural information processing precedes holistic information. Moreover, the processing of contextual information is necessary to process local featural information within a short presentation time (26 ms). Furthermore, for upright faces, holistic information seems to be available faster than for inverted faces (experiment 2). These differences in processing inverted and upright faces presumably cause the differential importance of featural and holistic information for inverted and upright faces.     

The effect of face orientation on holistic processing

Holistic processing, a hallmark of face processing, can be measured by the composite face effect: adults have difficulty recognising the top half of a face when it is aligned with a new bottom half, unless holistic processing is disrupted by misaligning the two halves. Like the recognition of facial identity, holistic processing is impaired when faces are inverted. To obtain a more refined measure of the influence of orientation on holistic face processing, we administered the composite face task to adults at each of seven orientations. In both experiment 1 (in which orientations were randomly intermixed) and experiment 2 (in which orientations were blocked), the composite face effect decreased linearly with rotation. We conclude that holistic processing is tuned to upright faces, diminishes as faces deviate from upright, and becomes insignificant once faces reach a sideways orientation. We propose a hierarchical model of face perception in which linear decreases in holistic processing underlie qualitative shifts in other aspects of face perception.     

Normal perception of Mooney faces in developmental prosopagnosia: Evidence from the N170 component and rapid neural adaptation

Individuals with developmental prosopagnosia (DP) have a severe difficulty recognizing the faces of known individuals in the absence of any history of neurological damage. These recognition problems may be linked to selective deficits in the holistic/configural processing of faces. We used two‐tone Mooney images to study the processing of faces versus non‐face objects in DP when it is based on holistic information (or the facial gestalt) in the absence of obvious local cues about facial features. A rapid adaptation procedure was employed for a group of 16 DPs. Naturalistic photographs of upright faces were preceded by upright or inverted Mooney faces or by Mooney houses. DPs showed face‐sensitive N170 components in response to Mooney faces versus houses, and N170 amplitude reductions for inverted as compared to upright Mooney faces. They also showed the typical pattern of N170 adaptation effects, with reduced N170 components when upright naturalistic test faces were preceded by upright Mooney faces, demonstrating that the perception of Mooney and naturalistic faces recruits shared neural populations. Our findings demonstrate that individuals with DP can utilize global information about face configurations for categorical discriminations between faces and non‐face objects, and suggest that face processing deficits emerge primarily at more fine‐grained higher level stages of face perception.     

Can holistic processing be learned for inverted faces?

The origin of "special" processing for upright faces has been a matter of ongoing debate. If it is due to generic expertise, as opposed to having some innate component, holistic processing should be learnable for stimuli other than upright faces. Here we assess inverted faces. We trained subjects to discriminate identical twins using up to 1100 exposures to each twin in different poses and images. In the upright orientation, twin discrimination was supported by holistic processing. Removal of a single face feature had no effect on performance, and a composite effect (Young, A. W., Hellawell, D., & Hay, D.C. (1987). Configurational information in face perception. Perception 16 (6), 747-759) was obtained. In the inverted orientation, however, above chance identification ability relied on (a) image specific learning, or (b) tiny local feature differences not noticed in the upright faces. The failure to learn holistic processing for inverted faces indicates that, in contrast to the situation for objects (Tarr, M.J., & Pinker, S. (1989). Mental rotation and orientation-dependence in shape recognition. Cognitive Psychology 21 (2), 233-282), orientation specificity of face processing is highly stable against practice.     

Negative facial expression captures attention and disrupts performance

In two experiments, participants counted features of schematic faces with positive, negative, or neutral emotional expressions. In Experiment 1 it was found that counting features took longer when they were embedded in negative as opposed to positive faces. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 and also demonstrated that more time was required to count features of negative relative to neutral faces. However, in both experiments, when the faces were inverted to reduce holistic face perception, no differences between neutral, positive, and negative faces were observed, even though the feature information in the inverted faces was the same as in the upright faces. We suggest that, relative to neutral and positive faces, negative faces are particularly effective at capturing attention to the global face level and thereby make it difficult to count the local features of faces.     

Holistic processing underlies gender judgments of faces

In three experiments, we investigated whether holistic processing underlies gender judgments about faces. Chinese participants were asked to make gender judgments for inverted, scrambled, or composite faces. Results showed that judgments were dramatically impaired by these manipulations (as compared with performance for normal upright faces), demonstrating three hallmark effects of holistic face processing that have been observed in perception of face identity. Whether the test faces were Chinese or Caucasian showed no effect on holistic processing of gender perception, in contrast to studies of identity analysis. These results suggest that holistic processing is a general mechanism for different aspects of face perception and are consistent with the idea that physiognomic properties that determine the gender of a face are universal, rather than race specific.     

Testing a two-component model of face identification: effects of inversion, contrast reversal, and direction of lighting

Enns and Shore (1997 Perception & Psychophysics 59 23-31) found additive effects of test orientation (upright or inverted) and direction of lighting (brow or chin lit) when they studied the inversion effect on face identification. A two-stage model was inferred in which inversion was processed by an orientation-sensitive component after which chin-lighting was processed by a lighting-sensitive component. Face identification is also strongly influenced by contrast reversal. A study is reported which aimed to (i) determine if contrast reversal interacts with lighting direction or orientation, findings that would support Enns and Shore's model; and (ii) to test their assumption that holistic encoding is prerequisite for their model by inducing featural encoding through training names to inverted faces. Names for unfamiliar brow-lit positive-contrast faces were trained with the faces upright or inverted. Identification accuracy was measured with combinations of orientation, lighting, and contrast. Consistent with their model, test orientation and direction of lighting were additive after training on upright faces and lighting and contrast reversal interacted. When holistic encoding was prevented following training on inverted faces, test orientation and lighting direction interacted for positive-contrast faces. Negative faces showed only an effect of direction of lighting. These results support Enns and Shore's two-stage model and their interpretation that orientation and direction of lighting interact following featural encoding of faces.     

面孔加工的结构编码阶段异族效应的加工方式： ERPs研究

实验采用事件相关电位（ERPs）技术,以大学生为被试,运用非洲、欧洲、亚洲三个不同种族的面孔照片,探究异族效应与加工方式的关系。行为实验结果显示,被试对非洲面孔的反应时快于欧洲面孔,且两者均快于亚洲面孔。ERP研究结果显示,亚洲面孔的N170波幅显著小于非洲和欧洲面孔的波幅,后两者的N170波幅没有差异,而且亚洲面孔的倒置效应最大。研究结果说明相对于异族面孔,本族面孔更多地使用构型编码的加工方式,且N170成分表现出右半球优势。     

Neural evidence for the contribution of holistic processing but not attention allocation to the other-race effect on face memory

Multiple mechanisms have been suggested to contribute to the other-race effect on face memory, the phenomenon of better memory performance for own-race than other-race faces. Here, two of these mechanisms, increased attention allocation and greater holistic processing during memory encoding for own-race than other-race faces, were tested in two separate experiments. In these experiments event-related potentials were measured during study (the difference due to memory, Dm) and test phase (old/new effects) to examine brain activation related to memory encoding and retrieval, allowing for selective investigations of these memory sub-processes. In Experiment 1, participants studied own-race (Caucasian) and other-race (Chinese) faces under focused or divided attention. In Experiment 2, participants studied own-race (Caucasian) and other-race (African American) faces presented upright or upside down (i.e., inverted). Both experiments showed decreases in memory performance when attention allocation or holistic processing was reduced, but these effects were similar for own-race and other-race faces. Manipulations of holistic processing, but not attention allocation, influenced the neural other-race effects during memory encoding. Inverted own-race faces showed similar neural patterns as upright other-race faces, indicating that when holistic processing of own-race faces was reduced, these faces were encoded similarly as upright other-race faces. No influences of the experimental manipulations on other-race effects during memory retrieval were found. The present study provides the first neural evidence that increased holistic processing during memory encoding contributes to the other-race effect on face memory.     

Inhibition of object identity in inhibition of return: Implications for encoding and retrieving inhibitory processes

Inhibition of return (IOR) effects, in which participants detect a target in a cued box more slowly than one in an uncued box, suggest that behavior is aided by inhibition of recently attended irrelevant locations. To investigate the controversial question of whether inhibition can be applied to object identity in these tasks, in the present research we presented faces upright or inverted during cue and/or target sequences. IOR was greater when both cue and target faces were upright than when cue and/or target faces were inverted. Because the only difference between the conditions was the ease of facial recognition, this result indicates that inhibition was applied to object identity. Interestingly, inhibition of object identity affected IOR both whenencoding a cue face andretrieving information about a target face. Accordingly, we propose that episodic retrieval of inhibition associated with object identity may mediate behavior in cuing tasks.     

A haptic face-inversion effect

We examined whether a face-inversion effect occurs when participants explore faces by touch. We used a haptic version of the inversion paradigm with 3-D clay facemasks and non-face control objects (teapots) moulded from real objects. Young, neurologically intact, blindfolded participants performed a temporally unconstrained haptic same/different task in each of four stimulus conditions: upright facemasks, inverted facemasks, upright teapots, and inverted teapots. There was a significant inversion effect for faces in terms of accuracy, but none for teapots. The results are considered in terms of the consequences of sequential manual exploration for haptic face processing.     

面孔方位对返回抑制的影响

采用辨别任务探讨了正立与倒立的中性面孔线索对返回抑制的影响。实验一采用同时线索化范式考察了正立与倒立面孔线索对靶刺激反应的影响,结果发现,两种面孔线索对随后靶刺激的反应没有影响。实验二采用单线索范式考察正立与倒立面孔对返回抑制的影响,结果发现,两种线索条件下均产生了返回抑制,而且返回抑制量没有显著差异。实验三,正立与倒立面孔作为靶刺激呈现,得到与实验二相同的结果。这些结果表明当采用中性面孔为线索时,返回抑制的产生并不受线索与靶刺激显著性的影响,而且返回抑制这种盲目机制不受任务难度的影响。     

Specificity of face processing without awareness

The recognition memory for inverted faces is especially difficult when compared with that for non-face stimuli. This face inversion effect has often been used as a marker of face-specific holistic processing. However, whether face processing without awareness is still specific remains unknown. The present study addressed this issue by examining the face inversion effect with the technique of binocular rivalry. Results showed that invisible upright faces could break suppression faster than invisible inverted faces. Nevertheless, no difference was found for invisible upright houses and invisible inverted houses. This suggested that face processing without awareness is still specific. Some face-specific information can be processed by high-level brain areas even when that information is invisible.     

Expert face coding: Configural and component coding of own-race and other-race faces

Configural and holistic coding are hallmarks of face perception. Although recent studies have shown that own-race faces are coded more holistically than other-race faces, the evidence for better configural coding of own-race faces is equivocal. We directly measured configural and component coding of own- and other-race male faces in Caucasian and Chinese participants. We manipulated individual features (components) or their spatial relations (configurations) using a novel morphing method to vary difficulty parametrically and tested sensitivity to these changes in a sequential matching task. Both configural and component coding were better for upright own-race than for upright other-race faces. Inversion impaired detection of configural changes more than it did detection of component changes, but also impaired performance more for easier discriminations,independent of type of change. These results challenge explanations of face expertise that rely solely on configural and holistic processing, and also call into question the widespread interpretation of large inversion decrements as diagnostic of configural coding.