Abstract
Iconic representations are ubiquitous; they fill children’s cartoons, add humor to newspapers, and bring emotional tone to online communication. Yet, the communicative function they serve remains unaddressed by cognitive psychology. Here, we examined the hypothesis that iconic representations communicate emotional information more efficiently than their realistic counterparts. In Experiment 1, we manipulated low-level features of emotional faces to create five sets of stimuli that ranged from photorealistic to fully iconic. Participants identified emotions on briefly presented faces. Results showed that, at short presentation times, accuracy for identifying emotion on more “cartoonized” images was enhanced. In addition, increasing contrast and decreasing featural complexity benefited accuracy. In Experiment 2, we examined an event-related potential component, the P1, which is sensitive to low-level visual stimulus features. Lower levels of contrast and complexity within schematic stimuli were also associated with lower P1 amplitudes. These findings support the hypothesis that iconic representations differ from realistic images in their ability to communicate specific information, including emotion, quickly and efficiently, and that this effect is driven by changes in low-level visual features in the stimuli.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s41235-016-0021-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Iconic, or simplified, non-realistic images of faces are pervasive in popular culture and communicative media
In Experiment 1, we examined whether schematization affected the detection of emotional expressions across a range of presentation times
Expression was included as a factor in analysis, there were no meaningful interactions with presentation time or stimulus type
Summary
Simplified, non-realistic images of faces are pervasive in popular culture and communicative media. The emoticon is included as a communicative tool used on every major online chat program distributed today. What advantages does an iconic representation have over a realistic one? Despite the ubiquity of iconic images, questions about their communicative function have been virtually ignored by cognitive science. It is well established that real faces receive special treatment within our perceptual systems. We are expertly tuned to recognize human faces and their expressions (Rhodes, Byatt, Michie, & Puce, 2004; Tsao, Freiwald, Tootell, & Livingstone, 2006), and we prefer looking at photographic faces over other stimuli (Chien, 2011). Representations of faces include cartoons, sketches, emoticons, etc., which can bear little resemblance to real faces, and these media seemingly have a niche in society that photorealistic stimuli do not fill
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