Culture influences not only human high-level cognitive processes but also low-level perceptual operations. Some perceptual operations, such as initial eye movements to faces, are critical for extraction of information supporting evolutionarily important tasks such as face identification. The extent of cultural effects on these crucial perceptual processes is unknown. Here, we report that the first gaze location for face identification was similar across East Asian and Western Caucasian cultural groups: Both fixated a featureless point between the eyes and the nose, with smaller between-group than within-group differences and with a small horizontal difference across cultures (8% of the interocular distance). We also show that individuals of both cultural groups initially fixated at a slightly higher point on Asian faces than on Caucasian faces. The initial fixations were found to be both fundamental in acquiring the majority of information for face identification and optimal, as accuracy deteriorated when observers held their gaze away from their preferred fixations. An ideal observer that integrated facial information with the human visual system's varying spatial resolution across the visual field showed a similar information distribution across faces of both races and predicted initial human fixations. The model consistently replicated the small vertical difference between human fixations to Asian and Caucasian faces but did not predict the small horizontal leftward bias of Caucasian observers. Together, the results suggest that initial eye movements during face identification may be driven by brain mechanisms aimed at maximizing accuracy, and less influenced by culture. The findings increase our understanding of the interplay between the brain's aims to optimally accomplish basic perceptual functions and to respond to sociocultural influences.

Humans are extremely sensitive to radial deformations of static circular contours (F. Wilkinson, H. R. Wilson, & C. Habak, 1998). Here, we investigate detection and identification of periodic motion trajectories defined by these radial frequency (RF) patterns over a range of radial frequencies of 2-5 cycles. We showed that the average detection thresholds for RF trajectories range from 1 to 4 min of arc and performance improves as a power-law function of radial frequency. RF trajectories are also detected for a range of speeds. We also showed that spatiotemporal global processing is involved in trajectory detection, as improvement in detection performance with increasing radial deformation displayed cannot be accounted for by local probability summation. Finally, identification of RF trajectories is possible over this RF range. Overall thresholds are about 6 times higher than previously reported for static stimuli. These novel stimuli should be a useful tool to investigate motion trajectory learning and discrimination in humans and other primates.

Previous psychophysical evidence suggests that motion and orientation processing systems interact asymmetrically in the human visual system, with orientation information having a stronger influence on the perceived motion direction than vice-versa. To investigate the mechanisms underlying this motion-form interaction we used moving and oriented Glass patterns (GPs), which consist of randomly distributed dot pairs (dipoles) that induce the percept of an oriented texture. In Experiment 1 we varied the angle between dipole orientation and motion direction (conflict angle). In separate sessions participants either judged the orientation or motion direction of the GP. In addition, the spatiotemporal characteristics of dipole motion were manipulated as a way to limit (Experiment 1) or favour (Experiment 2) the availability of orientation signals from motion (motion streaks). The results of Experiment 1 showed that apparent GP motion direction is attracted towards dipole orientation, and apparent GP orientation is repulsed from GP motion. The results of Experiment 2 showed stronger repulsion effects when judging the GP orientation, but stronger motion streaks from the GP motion can dominate over the signals provided by conflicting dipole orientation. These results are consistent with the proposal that two separate mechanisms contribute to our perception of stimuli which contain conflicting orientation and motion information: (i) perceived GP motion is mediated by spatial motion-direction sensors, in which signals from motion sensors are combined with excitatory input from orientation-tuned sensors tuned to orientations parallel to the axis of GP motion, (ii) perceived GP orientation is mediated by orientation-tuned sensors which mutually inhibit each other. The two mechanisms are revealed by the different effects of conflict angle and dipole lifetime on perceived orientation and motion direction.

Previous research has suggested that an object's category is retrieved as soon as it is detected (Grill-Spector & Kanwisher, 2005). Here we examined whether face views and identities are likewise treated as categories. We measured behavioural performance on three tasks: face detection, recognition of face view within identity, and within-view face identification, by using the method of constant stimuli combined with a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) paradigm. Stimulus duration was varied between 13 ms and 133 ms in order to estimate the time required for 75%-correct discrimination in each task. The results showed, respectively, 24- and 31-ms shorter threshold durations for face detection than for viewpoint recognition and face identification, while similar threshold durations for viewpoint recognition and face identification. We demonstrated that face view and identity are retrieved after face detection, and importantly, the view-based categorical analysis takes almost as long as the face identification process. Thus, additional processing is essential for viewpoint and identity extraction as opposed to face detection.

Perception of global structure conveyed in static Glass patterns is difficult, though not impossible, when the constituent dipoles are formed by partnering opposite polarity dots. We investigate whether the addition of motion signals to opposite-polarity Glass patterns can act to restore the perception of global structure. The stimuli were concentric Glass patterns consisting of 200 dipoles concentrically orientated, or oriented at random orientations, placed on a grey background. For each dipole, one luminance-increment dot (Weber contrast of 1) was paired with another dot set to a contrast ranging between luminance increment and luminance decrement (i.e., a Weber contrast range of approximately -1 to 1). Dipoles were either stationary (Experiment 1), or randomly re-positioned at 17Hz (Experiment 2), on each frame transition. A two-interval forced-choice paradigm, in conjunction with an adaptive staircase, was used to obtain Glass-pattern detection thresholds. The task required observers to identify the interval that contained concentric Glass structure; the other interval contained randomly orientated dipoles. Generally, lower global form thresholds were observed for dynamic and same-polarity Glass patterns than for static and opposite-polarity Glass patterns. In particular, for dynamic presentations improvement in sensitivity was more evident for opposite-polarity than for same-polarity Glass patterns. These findings suggest that motion plays an important role in the detection of global structure in dynamic Glass patterns.