STIMULUS REQUIREMENTS FOR FACE PERCEPTION: AN ANALYSIS BASED ON “TOTEM POLES”

Carrie L. Paras and Michael A. Webster*

• Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA

The stimulus requirements for perceiving a face are not well defined but are presumably simple, for vivid faces can often by seen in random or natural images such as cloud or rock formations. To characterize these requirements, we measured where observers reported the impression of faces in images defined by symmetric 1/f noise. This allowed us to examine the prominence and properties of different features and their necessary configurations. In these stimuli many faces can be perceived along the vertical midline, and appear stacked at multiple scales, reminiscent of “totem poles.” In addition to symmetry, the faces in noise are invariably upright and thus reveal the inversion effects that are thought to be a defining property of configural face processing. To a large extent, seeing a face required seeing eyes, and these were largely restricted to dark regions in the images. Other features were more subordinate and showed relatively little bias in polarity. Moreover, the prominence of eyes depended primarily on their luminance contrast and showed little influence of chromatic contrast. Notably, most faces were rated as clearly defined with highly distinctive attributes, suggesting that once an image area is coded as a face it is perceptually completed consistent with this interpretation. This suggests that the requisite trigger features are sufficient to holistically “capture” the surrounding noise structure to form the facial representation. Yet despite these well articulated percepts, we show in further experiments that while a pair of dark spots added to noise images appears face-like, these impressions fail to elicit other signatures of face processing, and in particular, fail to elicit an N170 or fixation patterns typical for images of actual faces. These results suggest that very simple stimulus configurations are sufficient to invoke many aspects of holistic and configural face perception while nevertheless failing to fully engage the neural machinery of face coding, implying that that different signatures of face processing may have different stimulus requirements.
Keywords: face perception, face detection, configural coding, facial features, symmetry, inversion effects, noise
Citation: Paras CL and Webster MA (2013) Stimulus requirements for face perception: an analysis based on “totem poles”. Front. Psychology 4:18. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00018

Received: 01 November 2012; Accepted: 09 January 2013;
Published online: 12 February 2013.

Edited by:
Tamara L. Watson, University of Western Sydney, Australia

Reviewed by:
Gyula Kovács, Budapest University of Technology, Hungary
Ming Meng, Dartmouth College, USA

Copyright: © 2013 Paras and Webster. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.
*Correspondence: Michael A. Webster, Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557 USA. e-mail: mwebster@unr.edu
http://www.frontiersin.org/Perception_Science/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00018/abstract

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MAPPING FACE RECOGNITION INFORMATION USE ACROSS CULTURES

Sébastien Miellet¹*, Luca Vizioli¹, Lingnan He², Xinyue Zhou³ and Roberto Caldara¹*

• ¹Department of Psychology and Fribourg Center for Cognition, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland
• ²School of Communication and Design, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China
• ³Department of Psychology, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China

Face recognition is not rooted in a universal eye movement information-gathering strategy. Western observers favor a local facial feature sampling strategy, whereas Eastern observers prefer sampling face information from a global, central fixation strategy. Yet, the precise qualitative (the diagnostic) and quantitative (the amount) information underlying these cultural perceptual biases in face recognition remains undetermined. To this end, we monitored the eye movements of Western and Eastern observers during a face recognition task, with a novel gaze-contingent technique: the Expanding Spotlight. We used 2° Gaussian apertures centered on the observers’ fixations expanding dynamically at a rate of 1° every 25 ms at each fixation – the longer the fixation duration, the larger the aperture size. Identity-specific face information was only displayed within the Gaussian aperture; outside the aperture, an average face template was displayed to facilitate saccade planning. Thus, the Expanding Spotlight simultaneously maps out the facial information span at each fixation location. Data obtained with the Expanding Spotlight technique confirmed that Westerners extract more information from the eye region, whereas Easterners extract more information from the nose region. Interestingly, this quantitative difference was paired with a qualitative disparity. Retinal filters based on spatial-frequency decomposition built from the fixations maps revealed that Westerners used local high-spatial-frequency information sampling, covering all the features critical for effective face recognition (the eyes and the mouth). In contrast, Easterners achieved a similar result by using global low-spatial-frequency information from those facial features. Our data show that the face system flexibly engages into local or global eye movement strategies across cultures, by relying on distinct facial information span and culturally tuned spatially filtered information. Overall, our findings challenge the view of a unique putative process for face recognition.
Keywords: face perception, culture, eye movements, gaze-contingent, expanding spotlight, extrafoveal processing
Citation: Miellet S, Vizioli L, He L, Zhou X and Caldara R (2013) Mapping face recognition information use across cultures. Front. Psychology 4:34. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00034

Received: 15 September 2012; Accepted: 15 January 2013;
Published online: 20 February 2013.

Edited by:
Tamara L. Watson, University of Western Sydney, Australia

Reviewed by:
Chris I. Baker, National Institutes of Health, USA
Corrado Caudek, Università di Firenze, Italy

Copyright: © 2013 Miellet, Vizioli, He, Zhou and Caldara. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.
*Correspondence: Sébastien Miellet and Roberto Caldara, Department of Psychology, University of Fribourg, Rue Faucigny 2, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland. e-mail: sebastien.miellet@unifr.ch; roberto.caldara@unifr.ch
http://www.frontiersin.org/Perception_Science/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00034/abstract

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SCIENTISTS UNCOVER HUMAN SUPERPOWER – PREDICTING THE FUTURE

October 24, 2012

Image Credit: Tonis Pan / Shutterstock

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Do you ever feel like you just have a really good feeling about something happening? Well, according to a new study, you actually may be predicting the future.
Scientists wrote in the current edition of Frontiers in Perception Science that our bodies are able to anticipate the near future.
The team already knew that our subconscious minds know more than our conscious minds, and physiological measures of subconscious arousal show up before conscious awareness. However, there were still some unanswered questions.
The Northwestern University researchers analyzed the results of 26 studies published between 1978 and 2010 to look into whether humans have the ability to predict future important events without any clues as to what might happen, said Julia Mossbridge, lead author of the study and research associate in the Visual Perception, Cognition and Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern.
Her example is that a person playing a video game at work while wearing headphones can’t hear when his or her boss is coming, but they may be able to anticipate it.
“But our analysis suggests that if you were tuned into your body, you might be able to detect these anticipatory changes between two and 10 seconds beforehand and close your video game,” Mossbridge. “You might even have a chance to open that spreadsheet you were supposed to be working on. And if you were lucky, you could do all this before your boss entered the room.”
She said this phenomenon is called “presentiment,” as in “sensing the future.” However, despite what the name suggests, she and other researchers say they are not sure people are really sensing the future.
“I like to call the phenomenon ‘anomalous anticipatory activity,’” she said. “The phenomenon is anomalous, some scientists argue, because we can’t explain it using present-day understanding about how biology works; though explanations related to recent quantum biological findings could potentially make sense.”
She said it is anticipatory because it seems to predict future physiological changes in response to an important event without any known clues. Also, it is an activity because it consists of changes in the cardiopulmonary, skin and nervous systems.
Test subjects during the studies exhibited significant changes in cardio and brain waves, as well as electrical measurements in their skin, 10 seconds prior to experiencing randomly chosen stimuli. This suggests that the subjects somehow anticipated they were about to see something that would provoke a sensory response.
Mossbridge’s analysis of the data puts the odds of her findings being the result of chance or coincidence at 400 billion to one.
“If this seemingly anomalous anticipatory activity is real, it should be possible to replicate it in multiple independent laboratories,” she and her co-authors write. “The cause of this anticipatory activity, which undoubtedly lies within the realm of natural physical processes (as opposed to supernatural or paranormal ones), remains to be determined.”

Source: Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112719249/esp-mind-body-future-102412/

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