Emotion recognition (sometimes) depends on horizontal orientations

Huynh, Carol; Balas, Benjamin

doi:10.1167/13.9.589

Cited by 8 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…Masking horizontal orientation information with noise also impairs face recognition performance relative to the masking of other orientation sub‐bands (Pachai, Sekuler, & Bennett, ), and demonstrates the lower efficiency of face recognition in the absence of this information. Besides face identification/discrimination, horizontal orientation information also proves superior than other orientation sub‐bands for emotion recognition (Huynh & Balas, ), an effect that is specific to faces and does not generalize to body stimuli (Balas & Huynh, ). While the horizontal orientation advantage does not extend to all aspects of face perception (gaze perception, for example, does not appear to selectively depend on horizontal information; Goffaux and Okamoto‐Barth, ), this information bias is nonetheless quite robust and applies to a broad class of judgments, demonstrating that key representations for processing faces recruit horizontal information to a disproportionate degree.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

School‐age children's neural sensitivity to horizontal orientation energy in faces

Balas

Lamsweerde

Saville

et al. 2017

Developmental Psychobiology

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Face processing mechanisms are tuned to specific low-level features including mid-range spatial frequencies and horizontal orientation energy. Behaviorally, adult observers are more effective at face recognition tasks when these information channels are available. Neural responses to face images also reflect these information biases: Face-sensitive ERP components respond preferentially to face images that contain horizontal orientation energy. How does neural tuning of face representations to horizontal information develop? Behavioral results show that this information bias increases over time such that younger children have a reduced bias favoring horizontally-filtered faces that increases with age. In the present study, we chose to investigate how neural sensitivity to these low-level features develops in the same age range, using ERP as a means of studying children and adults. Specifically, we examined how both face-sensitive ERP components (the P100 and N170) changed their responses to faces and non-faces as a function of age and orientation energy. Briefly, we found that the latency of the P100 and N170 component across age groups was consistent with the gradual emergence of a bias favoring horizontal orientation energy during middle childhood. The amplitude of the N170 component, however, exhibited a more complicated developmental profile that does not easily map onto previous behavioral results obtained from children in the same age ranges.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

School‐age children's neural sensitivity to horizontal orientation energy in faces

Balas

Lamsweerde

Saville

et al. 2017

Developmental Psychobiology

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“…To judge relative trustworthiness from face images, horizontal information appears to be both necessary and sufficient. This outcome can be easily understood via previous results suggesting both that perceived trustworthiness is affected by subtle variation in emotional expression in neutral faces (Engell, Todorov, & Haxby, 2010;Said, Sebe & Todorov, 2009) and that successful decoding of emotional expressions depends on horizontal orientation energy (Huynh & Balas, 2014;Yu, Chai & Chung, 2011). To the extent that judging trustworthiness amounts to evaluating the valence of facial expressions, it is not surprising to find a common reliance on the same subset of visual features for both judgments.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 60%

“…These results demonstrate that the visual information that is used for social evaluation in face images depends critically on the specific trait that observers are trying to evaluate. We predicted at the outset that all three judgments would lead to a pattern of behavior consistent with the preferential use of horizontal orientation information for face identification (Dakin & Watt, 2009), emotion recognition (Huynh & Balas, 2014), and other tasks (Goffaux & Dakin, 2010), but found instead that the removal of horizontal or vertical image structure had different consequences for different tasks.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

Low-level orientation information for social evaluation in face images

Balas

Verdugo

2018

Psychon Bull Rev

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Observers make a range of social evaluations based on facial appearance, including judgments of trustworthiness, warmth, competence, and other aspects of personality. What visual information do people use to make these judgments? While links have been made between perceived social characteristics and other high-level properties of facial appearance (e.g., attractiveness, masculinity), there has been comparatively little effort to link social evaluations to low-level visual features, like spatial frequency and orientation sub-bands, known to be critically important for face processing. We explored the extent to which different social evaluations depended critically on horizontal orientation energy vs. vertical orientation energy, as is the case for face identification and emotion recognition. We found that while trustworthiness judgments exhibited this bias for horizontal orientations, competence and dominance did not, suggesting that social evaluations may depend on a multi-channel representation of facial appearance at early stages of visual processing.

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“…These results suggest that particular diagnostic features of a corresponding facial expression make people more accurate at recognising facial expressions, in that people are biased to happy faces when displayed with an open rather than closed mouth, and to sad and neutral faces when displayed with closed rather than open mouths. Huynh and Balas () observed that an open mouth plays a vital role especially in happy faces due to the association between teeth and a happy expression. The visibility of the teeth affects the judgment of a distinct facial expression.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The effect of emotional recognition not only arises from the observer (e.g., their bodily state), but also from objective features of the sender (e.g., their facial expression). Emotional recognition largely relies on the salient perceptual features of the facial expression stimuli (e.g., mouth openness: open vs. closed; Huynh & Balas, ). In developmental research, perceptual differences based on a salient facial feature (e.g., the toothiness of a smile) may bias responses for the discrimination of a happiness expression in 7‐month‐old infants (Kestenbaum & Nelson, ).…”

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confidence: 99%

A differing bidirectional impact on the recognition accuracy of facial expression

Wang

et al. 2016

Int J Psychol

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This study explored a bidirectional impact on the recognition accuracy of various facial expressions deriving from both the observer and sender in a sample of Chinese participants. A facial manipulation task was used to examine the ability of an observer's facial feedback to modulate the recognition of various facial expressions. Furthermore, the effect of a sender's facial expression with an open or closed mouth on recognition accuracy was investigated. The results showed that only recognition accuracy of a sad facial expression was influenced simultaneously by bidirectional sources from a sender and observer. Moreover, the impact of the unidirectional cue of a sender's facial feature (i.e., mouth openness) on happy and neutral faces was found to influence the recognition accuracy of these faces, but not the observer's bodily state. These findings indicate that the bidirectional impact derived from an observer and sender on facial expression recognition accuracy differs for emotional and neutral expressions.

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Emotion recognition (sometimes) depends on horizontal orientations

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

School‐age children's neural sensitivity to horizontal orientation energy in faces

School‐age children's neural sensitivity to horizontal orientation energy in faces

Low-level orientation information for social evaluation in face images

A differing bidirectional impact on the recognition accuracy of facial expression

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