Abstract
Faces provide information about multiple characteristics like personal identity and emotion. Classical models of face perception postulate separate sub-systems for identity and expression recognition but recent studies have documented emotional contextual influences on recognition of faces. The present study reports three experiments where participants were presented realistic face-body compounds in a 2 category (face and body) × 2 emotion (neutral and fearful) factorial design. The task always consisted of two-alternative forced choice facial identity matching. The results show that during simultaneous face identity matching, the task irrelevant bodily expressions influence processing of facial identity, under conditions of unlimited viewing (Experiment 1) as well as during brief (750 ms) presentation (Experiment 2). In addition, delayed (5000 ms) face identity matching of rapidly (150 ms) presented face-body compounds, was also influenced by the body expression (Experiment 3). The results indicate that face identity perception mechanisms interact with processing of bodily and facial expressions.
Highlights
Faces provide powerful interpersonal communicative signals and influential theories of face perception have proposed dedicated behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying perception of faces
The main effect of facial expression reflects that neutral faces are matched more accurately than fearful faces, while the main effect of body expression indicates that faces with a neutral body are more accurately matched than faces with a fearful body
The results show that matching of facial identity is influenced by the emotion expressed in the face, and by the task irrelevant body expression as seen in the accuracy and reaction time data
Summary
Faces provide powerful interpersonal communicative signals and influential theories of face perception have proposed dedicated behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying perception of faces. Two hallmarks of classical theories of face perception are that processing of faces is dominant over other object classes and that different kinds of facial information like identity, expression and direction of gaze are processed in separate, relatively independent subsystems (e.g., Bruce and Young, 1986; Haxby et al, 2000; Calder and Young, 2005). There is evidence that facial expressions influence recognition of body expressions (Willis et al, 2011). These crosscategorical emotional context influences may be explained by activation of an emotion system that is not category specific and common for faces and bodies, thereby modulating face expression categorization
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