On Response Bias in the Face Congruency Effect for Internal and External Features.

Günter Meinhardt,Bozana Meinhardt-Injac,Malte Persike

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2017.00494

Günter Meinhardt, Bozana Meinhardt-Injac + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00494

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Abstract

Some years ago Cheung et al. (2008) proposed the complete design (CD) for measuring the failure of selective attention in composite objects. Since the CD is a fully balanced design, analysis of response bias may reveal potential effects of the experimental manipulation, the stimulus material, and/or attributes of the observers. Here we used the CD to prove whether external features modulate perception of internal features with the context congruency paradigm (Nachson et al., 1995; Meinhardt-Injac et al., 2010) in a larger sample of N = 303 subjects. We found a large congruency effect (Cohen's d = 1.78), which was attenuated by face inversion (d = 1.32). The congruency relation also strongly modulated response bias. In incongruent trials the proportion of “different” responses was much larger than in congruent trials (d = 0.79), which was again attenuated by face inversion (d = 0.43). Because in incongruent trials the wholes formed by integrating external and internal features are always different, while in congruent trials same and different wholes occur with the same frequency, a congruency related bias effect is expected from holistic integration. Our results suggest two behavioral markers of holistic processing in the context congruency paradigm: a performance advantage in congruent compared to incongruent trials, and a tendency toward more “different” responses in incongruent, compared to congruent trials. Since the results for both markers differed only quantitatively in upright and inverted presentation, our findings indicate no change of the face processing mode by picture plane rotation. A potential transfer to the composite face paradigm is discussed.

Highlights

When humans have reached high levels of expertise with individual members of an object category they have difficulty to judge object parts independently (Gauthier and Tarr, 2002; Chua et al, 2014)
The results showed that the effect size of the CE was significantly larger in upright [d = 1.83] compared to inverted presentation [d = 1.29], since there was no overlap of the CIs for Cohens’s d
In the Introduction it was outlined that congruency effects are expected in both sensitivity (CE) and bias (CB) if faces are processed holistically while observers attend to the internal facial features

Summary

Introduction

When humans have reached high levels of expertise with individual members of an object category they have difficulty to judge object parts independently (Gauthier and Tarr, 2002; Chua et al, 2014). Joint processing of face parts makes face processing highly efficient in various tasks, such as recognition (Richler et al, 2010; Wang et al, 2012; DeGutis et al, 2013), discrimination (Ellis et al, 1979; Richler et al, 2009; Meinhardt-Injac, 2013), and visual search (Hershler and Hochstein, 2005). It is disadvantageous when individual facial details have to be judged, since perception of these details contingently changes with the embedding facial context. The failure of selective attention to parts offers methodological access to the principles of feature integration in face perception (see Maurer et al, 2002; Richler and Gauthier, 2014 for overviews)

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