Abstract

The appearance of faces can be strongly affected by the characteristics of faces viewed previously. These perceptual after-effects reflect processes of sensory adaptation that are found throughout the visual system, but which have been considered only relatively recently in the context of higher level perceptual judgements. In this review, we explore the consequences of adaptation for human face perception, and the implications of adaptation for understanding the neural-coding schemes underlying the visual representation of faces. The properties of face after-effects suggest that they, in part, reflect response changes at high and possibly face-specific levels of visual processing. Yet, the form of the after-effects and the norm-based codes that they point to show many parallels with the adaptations and functional organization that are thought to underlie the encoding of perceptual attributes like colour. The nature and basis for human colour vision have been studied extensively, and we draw on ideas and principles that have been developed to account for norms and normalization in colour vision to consider potential similarities and differences in the representation and adaptation of faces.

Highlights

  • Stare carefully at the cross in the image in figure 1 for a minute or so, and close your eyes

  • How our judgements of such fundamental attributes as identity, expression, fitness or beauty are affected by the diet of faces we encounter is essential to understanding the psychology of face perception, whether those context effects result from changes in sensitivity or criterion and whether they reflect high-level and face-specific representations or lowlevel and generic response changes in the visual system

  • Face after-effects provide an important context for studying the processes of adaptation itself; whether the plasticity that is so readily demonstrated for simple sensory attributes is again a general feature of visual coding; and how this plasticity is manifest for the kinds of natural and ecologically important stimuli that the visual system is trying to digest

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Summary

VISUAL ADAPTATION AND THE PERCEPTION OF FACES

Stare carefully at the cross in the image in figure 1 for a minute or so, and close your eyes. We consider the properties and implications of adaptation effects in face perception It may not be obvious, the appearance of faces does depend strongly on the viewing context, and the same face can look dramatically different depending on which faces an observer is previously exposed to. Adaptation provides a potential tool for dissecting this neural code and a means to test whether the neural strategies that have been identified at early levels of the visual pathway can predict the characteristics of high-level vision To this end, we compare the after-effects for faces and consider their implications for the format of the neural code by which faces are represented, noting similarities and differences between face adaptation and analogous adaptation effects in human colour vision, where the format of the neural representation is relatively well defined. Face after-effects provide an important context for studying the processes of adaptation itself; whether the plasticity that is so readily demonstrated for simple sensory attributes is again a general feature of visual coding; and how this plasticity is manifest for the kinds of natural and ecologically important stimuli that the visual system is trying to digest

ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CODING
DYNAMICS OF FACE ADAPTATION
SITES OF SENSITIVITY CHANGE
SELECTIVITY OF FACE ADAPTATION FOR FACIAL ATTRIBUTES
ADAPTATION AS RENORMALIZATION
A T adapt to mean
A1-T shift
Findings
NORMS AND THE MECHANISMS OF FACE CODING
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