Abstract
After prolonged exposure to a distorted face with expanded or contracted inner features, a subsequently presented normal face appears distorted toward the opposite direction. This phenomenon, termed as face distortion aftereffect (FDAE), is thought to occur as a result of changes in the mechanisms involved in higher order visual processing. However, the extent to which FDAE is mediated by face-specific configural processing is less known. In the present study, we investigated whether similar aftereffects can be induced by stimuli lacking all the typical characteristics of a human face except for its first-order configural properties. We found a significant FDAE after adaptation to a stimulus consisting of three white dots arranged in a triangular fashion and placed in a gray oval. FDAEs occurred also when the adapting and test stimuli differed in size or when the contrast polarity of the adaptor image was changed. However, the inversion of the adapting image as well as the reduction of its contrast abolished the aftereffect entirely. Taken together, our results suggest that higher-level visual areas, which are involved in the processing of facial configurations, mediate the FDAE. Further, while adaptation seems to be largely invariant to contrast polarity, it appears sensitive to orientation and to lower level manipulations that affect the saliency of the inner features.
Highlights
In the course of the last decade, several studies have demonstrated that the way we perceive faces is systematically biased by the characteristics of a previously presented face, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the face adaptation aftereffect (FAE)
The pattern of results suggests that these aftereffects are similar in nature to those reported in previous studies demonstrating that prolonged viewing of a distorted face biases the perception of a subsequently presented face in a way that is opposite to the distortion of the adaptor image (Webster and MacLin, 1999; Zhao and Chubb, 2001; Watson and Clifford, 2003; Yamashita et al, 2005; Zimmer and Kovács, 2011a)
In the present study, we demonstrated that face distortion aftereffect (FDAE) could be evoked by stimuli consisting of three dots arranged in a triangular position, corresponding to the position of usual facial features
Summary
In the course of the last decade, several studies have demonstrated that the way we perceive faces is systematically biased by the characteristics of a previously presented face, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the face adaptation aftereffect (FAE). FAEs have been observed for a number of natural facial properties including identity (Leopold et al, 2001), gender (Webster et al, 2004), age (Schweinberger et al, 2010), ethnicity (Webster et al, 2004) as well as more dynamic facial features such as emotional expression (Webster et al, 2004; Fox and Barton, 2007), eye-gaze direction (Jenkins et al, 2006; Seyama and Nagayama, 2006), and lip angle (Jones et al, 2010) Such perceptual aftereffects enable researchers to link changes in perception to changes in the underlying neural mechanisms and provide information about the representation of complex visual patterns in the brain. These results are in line with data from monkey single-cell recordings (Perrett et al, 1982; Rolls and Baylis, 1986) and functional brain imaging studies in humans (Andrews and Ewbank, 2004) demonstrating a largely size-invariant neural representation of faces in the ventral regions of the temporal lobe
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