Abstract
In 1957, Craig Mooney published a set of human face stimuli to study perceptual closure: the formation of a coherent percept on the basis of minimal visual information. Images of this type, now known as “Mooney faces”, are widely used in cognitive psychology and neuroscience because they offer a means of inducing variable perception with constant visuo-spatial characteristics (they are often not perceived as faces if viewed upside down). Mooney’s original set of 40 stimuli has been employed in several studies. However, it is often necessary to use a much larger stimulus set. We created a new set of over 500 Mooney faces and tested them on a cohort of human observers. We present the results of our tests here, and make the stimuli freely available via the internet. Our test results can be used to select subsets of the stimuli that are most suited for a given experimental purpose.
Highlights
One of the hallmarks of vision is the ability to recognize objects on the basis of very little information
Large set of Mooney face stimuli that cover a range of difficulty levels and induce typical inversion effects in face perception
The behavior we observe for our new stimuli generally resembles the behavior observed with the original but much smaller stimulus set developed by Craig Mooney in the 1950’s
Summary
One of the hallmarks of vision is the ability to recognize objects on the basis of very little information. In order to study visuo-perceptual closure in children [1], in the 1950’s cognitive psychologist Craig Mooney created a set of 40 human face stimuli, each defined by a few smooth rounded patches of black and white (Fig 1B). Such stimuli can take a few seconds to recognize at first [2], but once the face is perceived it is difficult for a normally-sighted human observer not to see the face from that moment onward [3]. When such a stimulus is presented upside-down it is often not recognized as a face, even if it is immediately recognized as a face when presented upright [4], revealing a hallmark of holistic face processing
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