After effects in the Perception of Emotion Following Brief, Masked Adaptor Faces

Abstract

Adaptation aftereffects are the tendency to perceive an ambiguous target stimulus, which follows an adaptor stimulus, as different from the adaptor. A duration dependence of face adaptation aftereffects has been demonstrated for durations of at least 500ms, for identity related judgments. Here we describe the duration dependence of the adaptation aftereffects of very brief (11.7ms-500ms) backwardly masked faces, on both expression and identity category judgments of ambiguous target faces. We find significant aftereffects at minimum duration 23.5ms for emotional expression, and 47ms for identity, but these are abolished by backward masking with an inverted face, although these same adaptors can be correctly categorized above chance.The presence of a short duration adaptation effect in expression might be mediated by rapid transfer of low spatial frequency (LSF) information. We tested this possibility by comparing aftereffects in low pass and high pass filtered ambiguous targets, and found no evidence of independent adaptation of a LSF specific channel.

Neural basis of perceptual expectations: insights from transient dynamics of attractor neural networks

“…Priming, which have been used vastly to study such perceptual influences, is the phenomenon where the perception of a given stimulus, or the prime, affects the perception of a succeeding stimulus, or the target, even when the target is presented after a long delay or the prime is not explicitly perceived [1]. Using classical priming paradigms, it is observed that brief exposure to a stimulusranging from tens to hundreds of milliseconds -biases subjects to perceive the following stimuli either as dissimilar (adaptation aftereffects) or more similar (priming) to the priming stimuli [2,3]. Thus, in a categorization task, the category boundary may move towards or away from the prime.…”

“…Thus, in a categorization task, the category boundary may move towards or away from the prime. The duration of the prime and the prime-target asynchrony, as well as the type of intervening mask, affect both the strength and the direction of the effect [2,4]. Current evidence has led to the suggestion that a particular type of the observed priming effect may be primarily due to the conflicting acts of lingering activation from the prime and accumulating depletion of synaptic resources [5].…”