Is pigmentation important for face recognition? Evidence from contrast negation

It is extraordinarily difficult to recognize a face in an image with negated contrast, as in a photographic negative. The variation among faces can be partitioned into two general sources: (a) shape and (b) surface reflectance, here termed 'pigmentation'. To determine whether negation differentially affects the processing of shape or pigmentation, we made two sets of faces where the individual faces differed only in shape in one set and only in pigmentation in the other. Surprisingly, matching performance was significantly impaired by contrast negation only when the faces varied in pigmentation. This provides evidence that the perception of pigmentation, not shape, is selectively disrupted by negation and, by extension, that pigmentation contributes to the neural representation of face identity.     

Effects of early experience on children's recognition of facial displays of emotion

The present research examines visual perception of emotion in both typical and atypical development. To examine the processes by which perceptual mechanisms become attuned to the contingencies of affective signals in the environment, the authors measured the sequential, content-based properties of feature detection in emotion recognition processes. To evaluate the role of experience, they compared typically developing children with physically abused children, who were presumed to have experienced high levels of threat and hostility. As predicted, physically abused children accurately identified facial displays of anger on the basis of less sensory input than did controls, which suggests that physically abused children have facilitated access to representations of anger. The findings are discussed in terms of experiential processes in perceptual learning.     

Vulnerability of facial attractiveness perception to early and multi-year visual deprivation

Judgments of facial attractiveness invariably accompany our perception of faces. Even neonates appear to be capable of making such judgments in a manner consistent with adults. This suggests that the processes supporting facial attractiveness require little, if any, visual experience to manifest. Here we investigate the resilience of these processes to several years of early-onset visual deprivation. Specifically, we study whether congenitally blind children treated several years after birth possess the ability to rate facial attractiveness in a manner congruent to normally sighted individuals. The data reveal significant individual variability in the way each newly sighted child perceives attractiveness. This is in marked contrast to data from normally sighted controls who exhibit strong across-subject agreement in facial attractiveness ratings. This variability may be attributable, in part, to atypical facial encoding strategies used by the newly sighted children. Overall, our results suggest that the development of facial attractiveness perception is likely to be vulnerable to early visual deprivation, pointing to the existence of a possible sensitive period early in the developmental trajectory.     

Selective Literature Review and Selective Data Analyses: Implications for the (Re)Analysis of Public Access Research Data

This article addresses concerns raised by Pashler et al. (2016/this issue) about the effect size and data of Study 3 of Chatterjee et al. (2013). The analysis of the original data of Study 3, corrected for coding errors, shows that cash priming is associated with cost-related words (Cohen’s d = 0.49) and effect sizes of all three studies are within the range reported in the relevant literature. While this article underscores the importance of public access to research data to strengthen research enterprise, it alerts researchers that the use of selective literature and partial analysis can lead to misleading inferences.     

Object recognition and Random Image Structure Evolution

We present a technique called Random Image Structure Evolution (RISE) for use in experimental investigations of high-level visual perception. Potential applications of RISE include the quantitative measurement of perceptual hysteresis and priming, the study of the neural substrates of object perception, and the assessment and detection of subtle forms of agnosia. In simple terms, RISE involves the measurement of perceptual and/or neural responses as visual stimuli are systematically transformed—in particular, as recognizable objects evolve from, then dissolve into, randomness. Points along the sequences corresponding to the onset and offset of subjects’ percepts serve as markers for quantitatively and objectively characterizing several perceptual phenomena. Notably, these image sequences are created in a manner that strictly controls a number of important low-level image properties, such as luminance and frequency spectra, thus reducing confounds in the analysis of high-level visual processes. Here we describe the RISE paradigm, report the results of a few basic RISE experiments, and discuss a number of experimental and clinical applications of this approach.     

Prenatal auditory experience and its sequelae

Towards the end of the second trimester of gestation, a human fetus is able to register environmental sounds. This in utero auditory experience is characterized by comprising strongly low-pass-filtered versions of sounds from the external world. Here, we present computational tests of the hypothesis that this early exposure to severely degraded auditory inputs serves an adaptive purpose—it may induce the neural development of extended temporal integration. Such integration can facilitate the detection of information carried by low-frequency variations in the auditory signal, including emotional or other prosodic content. To test this prediction, we characterized the impact of several training regimens, biomimetic and otherwise, on a computational model system trained and tested on the task of emotion recognition. We find that training with an auditory trajectory recapitulating that of a neurotypical infant in the pre-to-postnatal period results in temporally extended receptive field structures and yields the best subsequent accuracy and generalization performance on the task of emotion recognition. This strongly suggests that the progression from low-pass-filtered to full-frequency inputs is likely to be an adaptive feature of our development, conferring significant benefits to later auditory processing abilities relying on temporally extended analyses. Additionally, this finding can help explain some of the auditory impairments associated with preterm births, suggests guidelines for the design of auditory environments in neonatal care units, and points to enhanced training procedures for computational models.     

The Disappearing “Advantage of Abstract Examples in Learning Math”

When teaching a novel mathematical concept, should we present learners with abstract or concrete examples? In this experiment, we conduct a critical replication and extension of a well-known study that argued for the general advantage of abstract examples (Kaminski, Sloutsky, & Heckler, 2008a). We demonstrate that theoretically motivated yet minor modifications of the learning design put this argument in question. A key finding from this study is that participants who trained with improved concrete examples performed as well as, or better than, participants who trained with abstract examples. We argue that the previously reported “advantage of abstract examples” manifested not because abstract examples are advantageous in general, but because the concrete condition employed suboptimal examples.