Abstract
Face perception is integral to human perception system as it underlies social interactions. Saccadic eye movements are frequently made to bring interesting visual information, such as faces, onto the fovea for detailed processing. Just before eye movement onset, the processing of some basic features, such as the orientation, of an object improves at the saccade landing point. Interestingly, there is also evidence that indicates faces are processed in early visual processing stages similar to basic features. However, it is not known whether this early enhancement of processing includes face recognition. In this study, three experiments were performed to map the timing of face presentation to the beginning of the eye movement in order to evaluate pre-saccadic face recognition. Faces were found to be similarly processed as simple objects immediately prior to saccadic movements. Starting ∼ 120 ms before a saccade to a target face, independent of whether or not the face was surrounded by other faces, the face recognition gradually improved and the critical spacing of the crowding decreased as saccade onset was approaching. These results suggest that an upcoming saccade prepares the visual system for new information about faces at the saccade landing site and may reduce the background in a crowd to target the intended face. This indicates an important role of pre-saccadic eye movement signals in human face recognition.
Highlights
Face recognition is an integral component of human perception as it mediates social interactions
Experiment 1 Face recognition abilities were mapped according to time frames prior to saccadic eye movements
Valid face recognition data was sorted into five separate time bins (30–59, 60–89, 90– 119, 120–149, and 150–180 ms) which represented periods from the presentation of the target stimuli to the onset of the eye movement
Summary
Face recognition is an integral component of human perception as it mediates social interactions. Bouma’s law describing the relationship between objects in a crowd to their spatial distances states that the ‘‘critical spacing’’ is roughly half of the eccentricity of the target [20,27], which suggests that the distances between faces in a crowd play a role in the ability to accurately recognize a face This improved pre-saccadic processing has been recently linked to the identification of objects in a crowd. It is notable that these changes in perception occurred without a positional change of the retina and they were related to a 0.5 fold change in the ‘‘critical spacing’’ between the target and distractor stimuli [18] This suggested that pre-saccade perception might aid in identifying objects, including faces, in a natural/social setting. The relationship between pre-saccade perception and face recognition was evaluated using similar paradigms designed previously [17,18], in order to determine whether there is a similar eye movement preparation effect on the processing of faces in either crowded or isolated states and whether this processing aids face recognition
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