Abstract
We investigated whether covert ensembles of high- (emotion), and low-level (brightness) visual information, extracted from peripheral faces (presentation/encoding:200 ms), unintentionally influences perception of a central target face stimulus in individuals typically developing (TD) and with autism spectrum condition (ASC). Graded alterations in the summary intensities of the emotion and brightness of the peripheral stimuli modulated the perceptions of the target face in both TD and ASC. In contrast, when we measured goal-directed (overt) ensemble face- emotion and brightness perception, we found that in half of ASC the overt ensemble emotion perception was impaired than TD. Additionally, we repeated both experiments with a backward visual mask to restrict not just encoding but also background processing in the visual system to 200 ms. This revealed that the effect of peripheral ensembles on centre perception was present only with brightness at least in TD but of overt ensembles was evident with both emotion and brightness in TD and ASC alike. These results suggest that while ensemble statistics of low-level information derived automatically and rapidly (200 ms) from contextualized faces are used for target face perception, the same takes longer with high-level information. However, overt facial ensembles are rapidly processed in both TD and ASC.
Highlights
We investigated whether covert ensembles of high, and low-level visual information, extracted from peripheral faces, unintentionally influences perception of a central target face stimulus in individuals typically developing (TD) and with autism spectrum condition (ASC)
Contextual ensemble emotion and brightness information that were covertly presented, were effortlessly utilized both by TD and ASC, within a short presentation duration of 200 ms, to represent the visual target
To study the above effect in comparison with that of ensemble summary statistics pertaining to low-level visual properties of face images, we tested whether the perceptual judgment of the target face’s brightness shifted from zero when there was a graded change in the summary brightness values of the peripheral face ensembles
Summary
We investigated whether covert ensembles of high- (emotion), and low-level (brightness) visual information, extracted from peripheral faces (presentation/encoding:[200] ms), unintentionally influences perception of a central target face stimulus in individuals typically developing (TD) and with autism spectrum condition (ASC). We asked – (a) whether visual information (high-level: emotion; low-level: brightness) conveyed by relatively complex ensembles such as human faces presented for a short duration (~200 ms, with little time to recruit top-down attentional resources while encoding stimuli) could directly influence the perception of a target face, automatically (without intention), in making a perceptual judgment; and (b) whether the findings in TD extend to ASC participants.
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