Abstract
Seeing facial features in the context of a full face is known to provide an advantage for perception. Using an interocular separation perception task we confirmed that seeing eyes within the context of a face improves discrimination in synthetic faces. We also show that this improvement of the face context can be explained using the presence of individual components of the face such as the nose mouth, or head-outline. We demonstrate that improvements due to the presence of the nose, and head-outline can be explained in terms of two-point separation measurements, obeying Weber’s law as established in the literature. We also demonstrate that performance improvements due to the presence of the mouth can be explained in terms of Vernier acuity judgments between eye positions and the corners of the mouth. Overall, our study shows that the improvements in perception of facial features due to the face context effect can be traced to well understood basic visual measurements that may play a very general role in perceptual measurements of distance. Deficiencies in these measurements may also play a role in prosopagnosia. Additionally, we show interference of the eyebrows with the face-inversion effect for interocular discrimination.
Highlights
As most people are able to accurately perceive and recognize numerous faces with a high degree of accuracy, the mechanism by which we perceive and categorize information relating to the features of the face has been the subject of intense study
Our research suggests that deficits in perception of the eye region in patients with prosopagnosia (Caldara et al, 2005; Bukach et al, 2008; Rossion et al, 2009) could be linked to deficits in the ability to make simple measurements such as separation of basic shapes and Vernier judgments
Our findings indicate that while the face context as a whole provides a definite advantage for the perception of interocular separation, the mechanism behind this face context advantage can be explained by a combination of basic separation discrimination and Vernier acuity
Summary
As most people are able to accurately perceive and recognize numerous faces with a high degree of accuracy, the mechanism by which we perceive and categorize information relating to the features of the face has been the subject of intense study. One dominant theory that has emerged is that faces may be perceived holistically as a single “gestalt” rather than perceiving the information describing the various features of the face separately (Tanaka and Farah, 1993) This perception of the whole as opposed to a collection of parts has been demonstrated in experiments showing that people were much more accurate at recognizing parts of the face in recognition tasks when presented with a complete face as opposed to a jumbled face with the parts in differing configurations, or with some parts absent (Tanaka and Farah, 1993; Leder and Carbon, 2004). Curvature discrimination is reportedly compromised in prosopagnosia (Kosslyn et al, 1995)
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