Effects of subjective similarity and culture on ensemble perception of faces

Abstract

It is well established that ensemble coding is regulated by physical similarity and variance in a set of stimuli. For example, observers are more accurate at judging the mean size of objects in a set if the overall size variance in the set is small. However, sometimes similarity among set members can be purely subjective. For example, faces from another race tend to look more similar than faces from one's own race. Very little is known about whether such subjective similarity also regulates ensemble coding in the same manner as objective similarity. To investigate this question, we had British and Chinese participants view sets of four faces that were of either own-race or other-race, own-gender or other-gender. After viewing each set the task was to judge whether a test face was presented in the set. Our results showed that, as demonstrated in prior research, participants often mistook a morphed set average to be a member of the set. Critically, this tendency to average a face set was not stronger for other-race faces. Hence contrary to objective similarity, subjectively perceived similarity in the other-race faces does not facilitate ensemble coding. The results in our British group also replicated de Fockert and Gautrey's (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 20 (3), 468-473, 2013) own-gender effect, where observers showed more averaging for own-gender faces. However, our Chinese subjects displayed the same level of averaging for both genders. This suggests a cultural difference in ensemble coding, where the owngender bias may be overridden by a stronger tendency to employ ensemble coding in Chinese participants.

Americans weigh an attended emotion more than Koreans in overall mood judgments

“…When the participants from Korean and American cultures were presented with angry/happy crowd faces and were asked to decide which of the two crowds they would avoid, Korean participants chose the crowds with overall angrier emotions more accurately than American participants. Similar results were observed from Chinese and British participants 18,19 such that Chinese participants were better at ensemble perception than British, suggesting that people from not just Korean but East Asian culture can perform social ensemble tasks better than the ones from Western culture.…”

“…To compose Caucasian face arrays, we used the FACES database 44 containing six facial expressions (neutral, sad, disgusted, fearful, angry, and happy) of 171 models (58 young, 56 middle-aged, and 57 older men and women). Because the models of the Yonsei Face Database were relatively young (mean age = 24.71 years, SD = 3.87, age range: 20-31), we used the young group models of the FACES database (mean age = 24.3 years, SD = 3.5, age range: [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. From this stimulus set, we selected happy and angry facial expressions of 16 identities (eight women and eight men).…”

Introduction to the special issue on ensemble perception

“…For example, ensemble perception of numerosity or numerical values (Brezis et al, 2015;Katzin et al, 2020;Lee et al, 2021;Melcher et al, 2020;Rosenbaum et al, 2021;Solomon & Morgan, 2018), explicit ensemble judgments of abstract aesthetic impressions (Brielmann & Pelli, 2020), and implicit ensemble perception of category prototypes (Khayat & Hochstein, 2019) even with novel image sets that have never been seen before (Khayat et al, 2021). There is also research suggesting that high level cognition and cultural factors can impinge on ensemble perception (Peng et al, 2020). Section 4: Temporal properties of ensemble perception and ensemble perception of temporal properties…”

Standard Cognitive and Mental Health Measures May Not Generalize Across Cultures

“…First, we adopted a total of 7 Western expressers' faces for each of the three emotions (i.e., happy, angry, fearful) adopted from the Chicago Face Database (CFD) (Ma et al, 2015) with one face being used solely for practice trials, which amounted to a total of 18 faces (3 female, 3 male faces for each emotion) for the formal test. The CFD has been widely used and has demonstrated internal consistency, reliability, and validity across cultures (Peng et al, 2021;Wilson et al, 2017;Wixted & Wells, 2017).…”