Left-Side Bias Is Observed in Sequential Matching Paradigm for Face Processing.

Chenglin Li,Xiaohua Cao,Jianping Wang,Qinglan Li

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02005

Abstract

The left-side bias refers to how a chimeric face is created from the left side of a face (from the viewer’s perspective) and its mirror image are considered more similar to the original face than a chimeric face created from the right side of the same face and its mirror image. Previous studies investigated the left-side bias by using the chimeric stimuli task, where the original face and chimeric face were presented simultaneously. However, it remains unclear whether left-side bias effect is observed when the original face and chimeric face are presented sequentially. We completed two experiments using the sequential matching paradigm to investigate this issue. The results from both Experiment 1 and 2 showed that participants judged the identical proportion of the left chimeric face and original face was significantly higher than that of the right chimeric face and original face, which implies that the left-side bias effect can be observed in the sequential matching paradigm for face processing.

Highlights

The results revealed that the participants would prefer to consider the left chimeric face more similar to the original face than the right chimeric face
Consistent with previous studies using simultaneous presentation (e.g., Luh et al, 1991; Burt and Perrett, 1997; Coolican et al, 2008; Proietti et al, 2015; Chung et al, 2017), our results showed that participants judged the identical proportion of the left chimeric face and original face as significantly higher than that of the right chimeric face and original face, which suggests that a reliable left-side bias effect for face processing was observed in the sequential matching paradigm
The prior results combined with our results indicate that three expert behavioral markers for face processing are observed stably when faces are presented simultaneously or sequentially, which suggests that all the expert behavioral markers for face processing are face-related, not task/strategy-related processing

Summary

Introduction

Many previous studies found that there are serial-specific expert behavioral markers for face processing including the inversion effect (e.g., Yin, 1969; Haxby et al, 1999), the composite effect (e.g., Young et al, 1987; for a review, see Richler and Gauthier, 2014), and the left-side bias effect (e.g., Gilbert and Bakan, 1973; Proietti et al, 2015) These face-selective effects indicate that the perceptual representation that we generate for faces differs from the presentation that is generated for non-face objects (for a review, see Yovel, 2016).

Methods

Results

Conclusion