知觉负荷对面孔多重社会范畴加工的影响

为了考察知觉负荷理论对于面孔多重社会范畴加工机制解释的可能性, 我们采用两个反应时实验探讨了姓名判断是否会在不同的知觉负荷条件下受到面孔性别与种族信息的影响。实验1通过侧抑制范式考察姓名判断中面孔种族引发的干扰效应是否会受到知觉负荷水平的调节。结果发现, 姓名判断的反应时间会随着负荷水平的提高显著延长, 即面孔种族引发的干扰效应不会随着负荷水平的提高而消失。实验2继续通过侧抑制范式考察了姓名判断中面孔性别引发的干扰效应是否会在不同知觉负荷水平下出现差异。结果发现, 在低负荷水平下, 个体在不一致条件下的反应时长于一致条件下的反应时, 并且被试会倾向于将中性名字的性别判断为与面孔的性别一致。在高负荷水平下, 个体的反应时在一致和不一致条件下没有显著差异, 并且被试对中性名字的性别判断属于随机猜测水平。上述结果表明, 种族加工具有自下而上的强制性加工的特点; 性别加工是受到注意资源调节的自上而下加工, 具有一定的灵活性。

The effect of perceptual load on the multiple social categories processing of faces

Perceptual load theory claims that the information processing stream of task-irrelevant stimuli would fade away along with the increase of load levels. This view has been confirmed when words, objects, celebrities and animal faces were regarded as task-irrelevant stimuli. But there is still a debate as to whether perceptual load levels could affect the processing of race and gender which belong to primary social categories of human faces. For this purpose, a new name judgement task was developed based on the flanker paradigm. Each trial consisted of the following sequence of events, a fixation cross that was present for 500 ms was followed by a vertically arranged names matrix in the center of screen, and the interfering face randomly appeared on the left or the right side of the screen simultaneously. The participants were asked to judge the race or gender of the only real name presented in each matrix. This stimulus did not disappear until the participants pressed a task key. The inter-trial interval (ITI) was 1000 ms long. Current study consisted of two experiments. Experiment 1 explored the interference effect of face on the race judgement of the real name at different load levels. Twenty-six undergraduate students were recruited in experiment 1. The results indicated that the higher the perceptual load level was, the longer of RT was. Moreover, RT of congruence condition, in which the race of real name is identical with that of adjacent face, was always shorter than that of incongruence condition. The results indicated that the race judgment of real names was always affected by the image of face. Experiment 2a-a conceptual replication-investigated the interference effect of the face on the gender judgement of real name at different load levels. We recruited thirty-three undergraduate students as participants and the results showed that the interference effect of face on the gender judgement of real name disappeared and there was no significant difference on RT between the congruence and the incongruence conditions at the high load levels. Experiment 2b (N = 26)-a conceptual extension-investigated the interference effect of the face on Chinese names with the neutral feature. The results indicated that at the low load levels, the gender judgment of neutral names was affected by image of face. However, at the high load levels, the accuracy rate of judging the gender of neutral name was at a random level. These results suggested that the attention system might have a bottom-up obligatory processing characteristic for racial information, whereas there was a top-down processing characteristic with a certain degree of flexibility on gender information which was modulated by the attention resource. In conclusion, results from the current study reveals that the perceptual load theory has certain limitations to explain face primary social categories processing. It is also indirectly proved that culture and theory of evolution have a profound effect on social categories processing of human.