Interaction between social categories in the composite face paradigm.

Abstract

The composite face paradigm (Young, Hellawell, & Hay, 1987) is widely used to demonstrate holistic perception of faces (Rossion, 2013). In the paradigm, parts from different faces (usually the top and bottom halves) are recombined. The principal criterion for holistic perception is that responses involving the component parts of composites in which the parts are aligned into a face-like configuration are slower and less accurate than responses to the same parts in a misaligned (not face-like) format. This is often taken as evidence that seeing a whole face in the aligned condition interferes with perceiving its separate parts, but it remains unclear to what extent the composite face effect also reflects contributions from other potential sources of interference. We present a new variant of the paradigm involving composites created from top and bottom parts of familiar faces drawn from orthogonal social categories of gender and occupation. This allows us to examine the contributions of differences in relatively visual properties (gender) or relatively semantic properties (occupation) to composite interference and to measure whether variation in a task-irrelevant category (e.g., differences in gender across the parts of the composite when the task is to categorize the occupation of one of the parts) will influence the size of the composite effect. Our findings show that the composite face effect can be modulated by task-irrelevant social categories and that this interference is primarily visual in nature because the influence of face gender is more direct and more consistent than the influence of occupation.

Perceptual integration and the composite face effect

“…As expected, for the task-relevant gender category, we found a clear composite effect, where judgments about the gender of the top or bottom half of a face were slower when the two halves were aligned than misaligned. However, and as previously noted both by Baudouin and Humphreys (2006) and by Chen et al (2018), this effect was most clearly evident when the gender of the two halves was incongruent (the Gender Congruence x Alignment interaction).…”

“…The task was intended to allow reasonably high accuracy, so that the most important findings involve reaction times. In line with criteria used in our previous study (Chen et al, 2018), reaction times from trials with incorrect responses and outliers of more than 3 SDs were excluded in the calculation of mean RTs in each condition; multivariate tests for normality of the data showed that the RTs were normally distributed. The ANOVA is summarized in Table 1.…”

“…This would have restricted the own-race condition to that half of the congruent race set in which the race of the face parts was the same as the race of the participant and therefore complicated the analyses and led to a substantial loss of power. Chen et al (2018) pointed out that the gender congruence effect is likely due to the incongruent gender pairings appearing more ambiguous in gender than the congruent gender pairings when the top and bottom halves are aligned. It was noteworthy that any comparable racial ambiguity created by the incongruent race pairs had minimal impact on the processing speed in this experiment, but of course the race dimension was irrelevant to the gender categorization task.…”

“…A development of this approach was made by Chen, Ren, Young and Liu (2018), who created composites from parts that varied in gender (male or female) and occupation (movie star or athlete). Their findings, however, were strikingly different from the pattern noted by Calder et al (2000).…”

“…From this perspective the pervasive influence of the visually-derived property of gender congruence on the composite face effect in Chen et al's (2018) experiments shows how interference originating in a relatively early perceptual locus can be a dominant factor in the composite effect. Since Chen et al (2018) chose faces that minimized perceptual differences across occupations, the inconsistency of the identity-specific occupation congruence effects points to a more minor role for non-perceptual decision and response factors.…”