Face and body emotion recognition depend on different orientation sub-bands

Abstract

ABSTRACTFace and body perception are both disrupted by picture-plane inversion—180-degree rotation leads to poorer recognition and discrimination. For face stimuli, this inversion effect is carried by horizontally-oriented structures, which also carry more information for identity than vertical orientations. We examined whether face and body emotion recognition exhibited similar dependencies on low-level orientation energy (horizontal vs. vertical features) and whether the inversion effect for faces and bodies expressing different emotional expressions is carried by different orientation sub-bands. We asked observers to classify happy/sad faces and bodies that were filtered to include only horizontal orientation energy, only vertical orientation energy, or both orientations. We found that face and body emotion recognition rely on different low-level features—faces required horizontal features, while bodies required vertical features. In neither case was the inversion effect limited to the optimal band for emotion recognition. We conclude that face and body emotion recognition processes are tuned to different low-level features, but that in both cases the inversion effect (and any presumed “special” face or body processing associated with it) is applied fairly broadly to images in each category.