A spatial frequency account of the detriment that local processing of Navon letters has on face recognition.

Abstract

Five minutes of processing the local features of a Navon letter causes a detriment in subsequent face recognition performance (Macrae & H. Lewis, 2002). We hypothesise a perceptual after-effect explanation of this effect in which face recognition is less accurate after adapting to high spatial frequencies at high contrasts.Five experiments were conducted in which face recognition performance was compared after processing high contrast Navon stimuli. The standard recognition deficit was observed for processing the local features of Navon stimuli, but not if the stimuli were blurred (Experiment 1) or if they were of lower contrast (Experiment 2).A face recognition deficit was observed after processing small high contrast letters equivalent to local processing of Navon letters (Experiment 3). Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that recognition of bandpass filtered faces interacted with the type of Navon processing, whereby the recognition of low-pass filtered faces was better following local rather than global processing. These results suggest that the Navon effect on subsequent face recognition is a perceptual phenomenon.

Expecting Happy Women, Not Detecting the Angry Ones: Detection and Perceived Intensity of Facial Anger, Happiness, and Emotionality

“…Nevertheless, to the best of my knowledge, the work presented here seems to include the first explicit attempt to control and adjust for the emotionality of the faces, and their relations in the emotional space, in an emotion-detection task. This attempt resulted in observed shifts in the d' values demonstrating that although a stimulus set may be adjusted, and used extensively by the scientific community (e.g., Hills & Lewis, 2009;Krumhuber & Manstead, 2011;Tottenham et al, 2009;Young & Hugenberg, 2010), this does not necessarily mean that the emotional stimuli of the respective gender and emotion category are equivalent to each other. Clearly, these are all topics that need further investigation and attention in the scientific community.…”

“…Again, as mentioned previously, the face stimuli used in Study I came from the standardized NimStim set of facial expressions (Tottenham et al, 2009) and have been used in a variety of studies (e.g., Hills & Lewis, 2009;Krumhuber & Manstead, 2011;Young & Hugenberg, 2010). However, as Tottenham et al (2009) discuss, the neutrality of 'neutral' faces should be thoroughly addressed.…”

“…The face stimuli used in Study I came from the standardized NimStim set of facial expressions (Tottenham et al, 2009) and have been used in a variety of studies in the scientific community (e.g., Hills & Lewis, 2009;Krumhuber & Manstead, 2011;Mobbs et al (2006); Young & Hugenberg, 2010). For example, Young and Hugenberg (2010) used the NimStim set in order to investigate the effects of in-group and out-group recognition of emotions from the same culture group as the participant (in-group) or from a different cultural group (out-group).…”

Lateral visual hemifield asymmetry and sex differences in recognizing low and high spatial frequency filtered faces.

“…A large amount of spatial frequency and hemispheric asymmetry research has not included samples with the same number of men and women (Evert, & Kmen, 2003;Goffaux, Hault, Michel, Vuong, & Rossion, 2005) and usually included samples of only one sex, usually male (Whitman, & Keegan, 1991;Peyrin et al, 2003) or did not report the number of participants of each sex (Hills, & Lewis, 2009;Reinvang, Magnussen, & Greenlee, 2002). For this reason, information about sex differences in hemispheric asymmetry in visual tasks is limited.…”

“…HSF mediate analytical processing, and LSF mediate holistic processing (Boeschoten, Kemner, Kenemans, & Van Engelan, 2005;Hills, & Lewis, 2009). …”