Rigid facial motion influences featural, but not holistic, face processing

Abstract

We report three experiments in which we investigated the effect of rigid facial motion on face processing. Specifically, we used the face composite effect to examine whether rigid facial motion influences primarily featural or holistic processing of faces. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3, participants were first familiarized with dynamic displays in which a target face turned from one side to another; then at test, participants judged whether the top half of a composite face (the top half of the target face aligned or misaligned with the bottom half of a foil face) belonged to the target face. We compared performance in the dynamic condition to various static control conditions in Experiments 1, 2, and 3, which differed from each other in terms of the display order of the multiple static images or the inter stimulus interval (ISI) between the images. We found that the size of the face composite effect in the dynamic condition was significantly smaller than that in the static conditions. In other words, the dynamic face display influenced participants to process the target faces in a part-based manner and consequently their recognition of the upper portion of the composite face at test became less interfered with by the aligned lower part of the foil face. The findings from the present experiments provide the strongest evidence to date to suggest that the rigid facial motion mainly influences facial featural, but not holistic, processing.

Categorizing identity from facial motion

“…While such data suggests facial motion is perceived configurally, others argue it utilises part--based processing and therefore by--pass the inversion effect (e.g., Knappmeyer, Thornton & Bülthoff, 2003;Xiao, Quinn, Ge & Lee, 2012). Due to such mixed findings, we aimed to investigate this further within the current study.…”

Holistic processing of static and moving faces.

“…Rigid facial motion (i.e., head rotation and nodding) has been shown to eliminate the composite face effect (Xiao et al, 2012), but non-rigid facial motion (e.g., smiling) often does not (Cook et al, 2015;Favelle et al, 2015;Steede & Hole, 2006;Xiao et al, 2013). Such discrepant results occur not only between studies of rigid and non-rigid facial motion but also between different studies investigating non-rigid facial motion.…”

“…It has been shown that rigid facial motion eliminates holistic processing (measured as the composite face effect, Xiao et al, 2012). However, none of the theories of holistic processing described above predicts that rigid facial motion should remove holistic processing completely.…”

“…These results indicate that rigid motion does not enhance part-based processing (cf. Xiao et al, 2012).…”

“…Thus, participants had to decide whether the top parts of study and test faces displayed the same person regardless of facial motion. If the presence of rigid facial motion eliminates holistic processing and promotes part-based processing under such circumstance (Xiao et al, 2012(Xiao et al, , 2013, neither task should exhibit holistic face processing.…”