Stimulus Selectivity of Figural Aftereffects for Faces.

Abstract

Viewing a distorted face induces large aftereffects in the appearance of an undistorted face. The authors examined the processes underlying this adaptation by comparing how selective the aftereffects are for different dimensions of the images including size, spatial frequency content, contrast, and color. Face aftereffects had weaker selectivity for changes in the size, contrast, or color of the images and stronger selectivity for changes in contrast polarity or spatial frequency. This pattern could arise if the adaptation is contingent on the perceived similarity of the stimuli as faces. Consistent with this, changing contrast polarity or spatial frequency had larger effects on the perceived identity of a face, and aftereffects were also selective for different individual faces. These results suggest that part of the sensitivity changes underlying the adaptation may arise at visual levels closely associated with the representation of faces.

Face-Space: A Unifying Concept in Face Recognition Research

“…Contrastive facial after-effects have also been observed for judgments of attractiveness (Rhodes, Jeffery, Watson, Clifford, & Nakayama, 2003), personality (Buckingham et al, 2006;Wincenciak, Dzhelyova, Perrett, & Barraclough, 2013), emotion and gender (Webster, Kaping, Mizokami, & Duhamel, 2004) and identity (Leopold, O'Toole, Vetter, & Blanz, 2001;Leopold, Rhodes, Müller, & Jeffery, 2005). Face after-effects transfer across face identities (even to the perceivers' own face; Webster & MacLin, 1999), from an adaptor of one size to test stimuli of a different size (Zhao & Chubb, 2001), across different parts of the retina (Hurlbert, 2001;Anderson & Wilson, 2005) and partially across viewpoints (Jeffery, Rhodes, & Bussey, 2006;Pourtois, Schwartz, Seghier, Lazeyras, & Vuilleumier, 2005;Ryu & Chaudhuri, 2006), yet visual similarity between the adaptor and test is a critical variable in the magnitude of the FDAEs (Yamashita, Hardy, De Valois, & Webster, 2005) at least for unfamiliar faces (Hills & Lewis, 2012). For familiar faces, there is greater transference across size and viewpoint (Carbon & Leder, 2005;Jiang, Blanz, & O'Toole, 2006), indicating that face after-effects involve higher-level perceptual processing than observed in other after-effects.…”

Adaptation to different mouth shapes influences visual perception of ambiguous lip speech

“…The effects of visual adaptation on face perception occur when the same individuals (see, e.g., Yamashita, Hardy, De Valois, & Webster, 2005) and when different individuals (see, e.g., Rhodes et al, 2003;Yamashita et al, 2005) are shown at adaptation and test. Furthermore, aftereffects for normality and attractiveness judgments of faces occur when the faces shown during the adaptation and test phases differ in size (e.g., Bestelmeyer et al, 2008;Little et al, 2005) or in orientation (e.g., Jeffery, Rhodes, & Busey, 2006;Rhodes et al, 2003), suggesting that face aftereffects reflect adaptation of neurons that code high-level aspects of faces, rather than low-level (e.g.…”

After effects in the Perception of Emotion Following Brief, Masked Adaptor Faces

“…Our approach differs from both [12] and [51] as we examine the results of adaptation by an intact (BSF stimulus), on its HSF and LSF components. We thus consider the question of whether, in the perception of natural face images, LSF information and HSF information adapt independently and whether more rapid extraction of LSF information, means that at short adaptor durations, adaptation is expressed more strongly in LSF components.…”

“…If LSF information was being used to drive the category decision, we expected to find more adaptation in the LSF face target, and for the magnitude of the aftereffect to be uncorrelated with the magnitude of the aftereffect expressed in HSF targets. Previous work, for example [12], has concentrated on whether adaptation can be induced independently by HSF and LSF adaptors. They found that configural face adaptation in HSF and LSF channels is highly specific, and that aftereffects do not survive changes in spatial frequency.…”