Dissociation between the behavioural and electrophysiological effects of the face and body composite illusions

Several studies have reported similarities between perceptual processes underlying face and body perception, particularly emphasizing the importance of configural processes. Differences between the perception of faces and the perception of bodies were observed by means of a manipulation targeting a specific subtype of configural processing: the composite illusion. The composite face illusion describes the fact that two identical top halves of a face are perceived as being different if they are presented with different bottom parts. This effect disappears, if both halves are laterally shifted. Crucially, the effect of misalignment is not observed for bodies. This study aimed to further explore differences in the time course of face and body perception by using the composite effect. The present results replicated behavioural effects illustrating that misalignment affects the perception of faces but not bodies. Thus, face but not body perception relies on holistic processing. However, differences in the time course of the processing of both stimulus categories emerged at the N170 and P200. The pattern of the behavioural data seemed to be related to the P200. Thus, the present data indicate that holistic processes associated with the effect of misalignment might occur 200 ms after stimulus onset.     

第一印象中面孔-人格知觉和语音-人格知觉的异同

人们会根据陌生人的面孔线索或语音线索迅速地对其人格特质进行主观推断而形成第一印象。面孔-人格知觉第一印象和语音-人格知觉第一印象在维度结构和内在机制上具有相似性;在对具体人格特质和维度的敏感性,以及具体的认知机制方面又具有各自的特异性。未来研究可以基于同一批被知觉者开展面孔-人格知觉第一印象和语音-人格知觉第一印象的直接比较,并着力探究二者的过程特点,以及人格知觉第一印象形成时面孔和语音知觉的跨模态整合效应。     

身份认同：“换脸术”引发的哲学思考与解读

“换脸”打破了面孔和身份一一对应的关系,该如何理解术后“身份主体”问题呢？具身性和故事叙事的方式是以身体作为理解世界的视角或者通过对其生活经历的叙述界定身份问题,然而具身性忽视了脸的双重维度的区分,故事叙事则有主观重置的嫌疑。一种可能的路径是将新面孔看作过渡客体,逐渐将异组织移植同化为受者的完全一体化,“脸”作为一种符号使用,其意义在于日常生活的互动。这种策略可使受者在现实和虚幻之间作出区分,更易于重塑身份认同。虽然心理排异和“被侵占”等问题仍需进一步调整,但它仍不失为一种合理路径。

     

从面孔模块到马赛克──视觉特异性加工的脑机制

“脑功能的模块性”是视觉乃至整个认知神经科学的研究热点。特异性的面孔加工模块被当作是认知模块假说的最好证据。但综述跨学科的正反两方面实验证据表明,视觉加工存在特异性,并没有普遍的模块式的亚单元,而是“马赛克”镶嵌式的组构。     

The “parts and wholes” of face recognition: A review of the literature

It has been claimed that faces are recognized as a “whole” rather than by the recognition of individual parts. In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1993, Martha Farah and I attempted to operationalize the holistic claim using the part/whole task. In this task, participants studied a face and then their memory presented in isolation and in the whole face. Consistent with the holistic view, recognition of the part was superior when tested in the whole-face condition compared to when it was tested in isolation. The “whole face” or holistic advantage was not found for faces that were inverted, or scrambled, nor for non-face objects, suggesting that holistic encoding was specific to normal, intact faces. In this paper, we reflect on the part/whole paradigm and how it has contributed to our understanding of what it means to recognize a face as a “whole” stimulus. We describe the value of part/whole task for developing theories of holistic and non-holistic recognition of faces and objects. We discuss the research that has probed the neural substrates of holistic processing in healthy adults and people with prosopagnosia and autism. Finally, we examine how experience shapes holistic face recognition in children and recognition of own- and other-race faces in adults. The goal of this article is to summarize the research on the part/whole task and speculate on how it has informed our understanding of holistic face processing.     

Judging trustworthiness from faces: Emotion cues modulate trustworthiness judgments in young children

By adulthood, people judge trustworthiness from appearances rapidly and reliably. However, we know little about these judgments in children. This novel study investigates the developmental trajectory of explicit trust judgments from faces, and the contribution made by emotion cues across age groups. Five‐, 7‐, 10‐year‐olds, and adults rated the trustworthiness of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces with neutral expressions. The same participants also rated faces displaying overt happy and angry expressions, allowing us to investigate whether emotion cues modulate trustworthiness judgments similarly in children and adults. Results revealed that the ability to evaluate the trustworthiness of faces emerges in childhood, but may not be adult like until 10 years of age. Moreover, we show that emotion cues modulate trust judgments in young children, as well as adults. Anger cues diminished the appearance of trustworthiness for participants from 5 years of age and happy cues increased it, although this effect did not consistently emerge until later in childhood, that is, 10 years of age. These associations also extended to more subtle emotion cues present in neutral faces. Our results indicate that young children are sensitive to facial trustworthiness, and suggest that similar expression cues modulate these judgments in children and adults.     

Dissecting the time course of person recognition in natural viewing environments

Person recognition often unfolds over time and distance as a person approaches, with the quality of identity information from faces, bodies, and motion in constant flux. Participants were familiarized with identities using close‐up and distant videos. Recognition was tested with videos of people approaching from a distance. We varied the timing of prompted responses in the test videos, the amount of video seen, and whether the face, body, or whole person was visible. A free response condition was also included to allow participants to respond when they felt ‘confident’. The pattern of accuracy across conditions indicated that recognition judgments were based on the most recently available information, with no contribution from qualitatively diverse and statistically useful person cues available earlier in the video. Body recognition was stable across viewing distance, whereas face recognition improved with proximity. The body made an independent contribution to recognition only at the farthest distance tested. Free response latencies indicated meta‐knowledge of the optimal proximity for recognition from faces versus bodies. Notably, response bias varied strongly as a function of participants’ expectation about whether closer proximity video was forthcoming. These findings lay the groundwork for developing person recognition theories that generalize to natural viewing environments.     

Adolescents coping with the COVID-19 pandemic: ‘every day is like another Sunday’

COVID-19 has upended the way analysts and psychotherapists practice. Many use the phone for their sessions, many are using video platforms, and many use a combination of the two. Work with adolescents is very challenging in this new modality because of the loss of in-person connection and immediate non-verbal cues. The public health restrictions put in place to manage COVID-19 spread are at odds with the adolescent tasks of adventuring, experimenting and gaining new experiences. In addition, increased anxieties about infection, contamination and invasion are often manifest and adolescents can regress in the face of them. Using seminal ideas from Bion, this article looks at two process examples from adolescent boys who struggled with parts of themselves that felt disturbing and unacceptable. The author discusses the clinical exchanges in detail and offers ideas about the difficulty of creating psychic space when working virtually.