Abstract
Though artificial faces of various kinds are rapidly becoming more and more life-like due to advances in graphics technology (Suwajanakorn et al., 2015; Booth et al., 2017), observers can typically distinguish real faces from artificial faces. In general, face recognition is tuned to experience such that expert-level processing is most evident for faces that we encounter frequently in our visual world, but the extent to which face animacy perception is also tuned to in-group vs. out-group categories remains an open question. In the current study, we chose to examine how the perception of animacy in human faces and dog faces was affected by face inversion and the duration of face images presented to adult observers. We hypothesized that the impact of these manipulations may differ as a function of species category, indicating that face animacy perception is tuned for in-group faces. Briefly, we found evidence of such a differential impact, suggesting either that distinct mechanisms are used to evaluate the “life” in a face for in-group and out-group faces, or that the efficiency of a common mechanism varies substantially as a function of visual expertise.
Highlights
Face animacy, by which we refer to the appearance of a face as looking real or alive, is robustly perceived by observers (Farid and Bravo, 2011)
This is at odds with previous results (Balas et al, 2018) indicating that orientation generally does not impact psychometric curves for animacy categorization, so how do we explain the discrepancy? An important distinction between Experiment 1 and Balas et al (2018) is the inclusion of longer presentation times, which may indicate that orientation only affects animacy categorization when images are presented for sufficiently long periods of time
We hypothesized that the reduced expertise for dog faces in the general population might lead to different influences of these stimulus parameters on animacy categorization performance
Summary
By which we refer to the appearance of a face as looking real or alive, is robustly perceived by observers (Farid and Bravo, 2011). The animacy of a face is something that observers are capable of measuring, and the outcome of their measurement can influence a range of subsequent judgments about a face. Besides being another example of a categorization task we can ask observers to carry out with face images, why should we continue to examine the nature of animacy perception? Faces that are more doll-like are rated as less likely to feel pain or have motives, for example (Looser and Wheatley, 2010), demonstrating that participants tend to discount the potential for artificial-looking faces to have emotions and mental
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