Low-level orientation information for social evaluation in face images

Abstract

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.

Neural mechanisms of face emotion processing in youths and adults with bipolar disorder

“…Faces are an important source of social information and the ability to recognize, interpret, and respond appropriately to human faces is paramount to social functioning . These skills, as well as their neural mechanisms, are an important part of development .…”

A general serial dependence among various facial traits: Evidence from Markov Chain and derivative of Gaussian

“…The general mechanism underlying serial dependence of face perception offers new evidence for a better understanding of social evaluation in face processing. Previous studies have shown that people make facial judgments in social context based on high-level properties of facial appearance (e.g., masculinity), as well as a multiple-channel representation of facial appearance at early age of visual processing, suggesting a task-specific mechanism in social trait evaluation ( Balas & Verdugo, 2018 ). For example, evaluation of trustworthiness depends critically on horizontal orientation, whereas competence and dominance evaluation do not, which indicates that the visual information used for social evaluation relies on which trait the observers are trying to evaluate ( Balas & Verdugo, 2018 ).…”

“…These social judgments play a significant role in our daily life: for example, the perceived dominance and trustworthiness of faces can influence leadership decisions ( Ballew & Todorov, 2007 ). As with other perceptual processes, face perception of social characteristics remains relatively stable despite constant changes in visual inputs because of factors including eye movement, shadows, and occlusion; thus researchers called it the invariant aspect of face processing ( Balas & Verdugo, 2018 ; Bruce & Young, 1986 ; Calder & Young, 2005 ). However, the mechanism underlying the temporal stability of facial trait perception remains poorly understood.…”

“…Recent studies also pointed out that attractiveness should also be added to the model of social inferences from faces and developed and validated a three-dimensional model involving approachability, dominance, and youthful-attractiveness ( Sutherland, Oldmeadow, Santos, Towler, Michael Burt, & Young, 2013 ; Etcoff, Stock, Haley, Vickery, & House, 2011 ; Jones, DeBruine, Flake, Liuzza, Antfolk, Arinze, Ndukaihe, Bloxsom Lewis, Foroni, & Willis, 2021 ). Studies in neuroscience also suggested that different dimensions of character traits may be processed via shared and dissociable neural mechanisms and circuits ( Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008 ; Taubert et al, 2016 ; Balas & Verdugo, 2018 ). For instance, perception of attractiveness involves orbitofrontal cortex ( O'Doherty, Winston, Critchley, Perrett, Burt, & Dolan, 2003 ), perception of trustworthiness involves amygdala ( Todorov, Gobbini, Evans, & Haxby, 2007 ); however, perception of both traits involved the core face processing areas at the structural encoding stage (e.g., fusiform face area; Eimer, 2000 ; Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2000 ; Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997 ).…”

Both high and low spatial frequencies are critical for visual consciousness in autism: Evidence of an emotional attentional blink paradigm.

“…Efficient face processing play an important role in successful navigation of the social world (see Oruc et al, 2019) and people demonstrate the remarkable ability to process human faces and to identify emotion on faces (Tanaka, 2001). This ability would partly rely on the treatment of low-level information such as orientation and spatial frequencies (Balas and Verdugo, 2018;Oruc et al, 2019). In a visual stimulus, spatial frequency refers to the energy distribution derived from the Fourier transform, and expressed in the number of cycle per degree of visual angle (Park et al, 2012).…”