Ignored Faces Produce Figural Face Aftereffects

Janice E Murray,Madeline Judge,Yan Chen,Jason Jeremy Sinclair Barton

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045928

Abstract

Following adaptation to faces with contracted (or expanded) internal features, faces previously perceived as normal appear distorted in the opposite direction. This figural face aftereffect suggests face-coding mechanisms adapt to changes in the spatial relations of features and/or the global structure of faces. Here, we investigated whether the figural aftereffect requires spatial attention. Participants ignored a distorted adapting face and performed a highly demanding letter-count task. Before and after adaptation, participants rated the normality of morphed distorted faces ranging from 50% contracted through undistorted to 50% expanded. A robust aftereffect was observed. These results suggest that the figural face aftereffect can occur in the absence of spatial attention, even when the attentional demands of the relevant task are high.

Highlights

Faces are arguably one of the most salient classes of stimuli we encounter in the visual environment, yielding crucial information about gender, identity, race and emotional state
To foreshadow our results, we found that when attention is directed away from task-irrelevant adapting faces, figural aftereffects do occur even when the attentional load in the relevant task is high
In pairing a task-irrelevant adapting face with a highly demanding letter-count task, we sought to determine whether adaptation to global configural distortions of faces shifts what looks normal in the absence of spatial attention

Summary

Introduction

Faces are arguably one of the most salient classes of stimuli we encounter in the visual environment, yielding crucial information about gender, identity, race and emotional state. In addition to figural face aftereffects, identity-, emotion-, race-, and gender-specific aftereffects occur following adaptation to faces [2,4,5,6], and these aftereffects suggest very responsive processing mechanisms are constantly at play to provide the most up-to-date internal representation of faces. Moradi et al [7] paired low-contrast adapting faces with a demanding working-memory task to create conditions of inattentional blindness Under these conditions, the participants who were purportedly unaware of the adapting faces showed no significant face identity aftereffect (it is of note that the null effect was obtained with a small sample size of seven and approached significance). To address the novel question of whether adaptation occurs when participants are aware of, but ignore, task-irrelevant faces, we used the figural aftereffect paradigm and asked participants to perform a highly demanding relevant task in the presence of an unattended, visible adaptation face. To foreshadow our results, we found that when attention is directed away from task-irrelevant adapting faces, figural aftereffects do occur even when the attentional load in the relevant task is high

Method

Results

Discussion