The composite face illusion

Murphy, Jennifer; Gray, Katie; Cook, Richard

doi:10.3758/s13423-016-1131-5

Cited by 65 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 178 publications

(235 reference statements)

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“…Consistent with the documented normative properties of the composite face illusion (Murphy et al, 2017;Rossion, 2013), our paradigm produced marked shifts only when distractors were spatially aligned and arrangements were presented upright; little or no modulation was seen when distractor regions were misaligned or when composite arrangements were shown upside down. This selective modulation indicates that PSE shifts observed in upright-aligned arrangements were attributable to the illusion, not to response bias.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 80%

“…As described above, the composite face illusion manifests disproportionately when distractor and target regions are spatially aligned, and arrangements are presented upright. Little, if any, illusory distortion is seen when target and distractor regions are misaligned, or when aligned arrangements are presented upside down (Murphy et al, 2017;Rossion, 2013). Although the focus of the present paper is inter-observer variability in composite illusion susceptibility, we first sought to confirm that our psychophysical paradigm replicated these key features of the illusion.…”

Section: Replicating the Normative Properties Of The Illusionmentioning

confidence: 87%

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Are the facial gender and facial age variants of the composite face illusion products of a common mechanism?

et al. 2019

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When the upper half of one face ('target region') is spatially aligned with the lower half of another ('distractor region'), the two halves appear to fuse together perceptually, changing observers' subjective perception of the target region. This 'composite face illusion' is regarded as a key hallmark of holistic face processing. Importantly, distractor regions bias observers' subjective perception of target regions in systematic, predictable ways. For example, male and female distractor regions make target regions appear masculine and feminine; young and old distractor regions make target regions appear younger and older. In the present study, we first describe a novel psychophysical paradigm that yields precise reliable estimates of these perceptual biases. Next, we use this novel procedure to establish a clear relationship between observers' susceptibility to the age and gender biases induced by the composite face illusion. This relationship is seen in a lab-based sample (N = 100) and is replicated in an independent sample tested online (N = 121). Our findings suggest that age and gender variants of the composite illusion may be different measures of a common structural binding process, with an origin early in the face-processing stream. Keywords Composite face illusion. Facial gender. Facial age. Individual differences. Psychophysics Upright faces are thought to engage holistic processing whereby local features are integrated into a unified whole for the purposes of accurate and efficient interpretation (Farah, Wilson,

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 80%

Section: Replicating the Normative Properties Of The Illusionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Are the facial gender and facial age variants of the composite face illusion products of a common mechanism?

et al. 2019

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“…The background to our study lies in recent demonstrations and theoretical analyses that emphasise the possibility that the composite face effect measured in current behavioural paradigms might be driven by more than one underlying factor (Chua et al 2014(Chua et al , 2015; Chua perceptual illusion, as was noted by Young et al (1987) and emphasised more recently by Rossion (2013) and by Murphy et al (2016). The point is rather to do with whether existing procedures can offer a fully process-pure measure of the illusion, or are also to some extent influenced by other factors.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interaction between social categories in the composite face paradigm.

Chen

Ren

Young

et al. 2018

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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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.

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“…Evidence of holistic face perception is provided by the composite face effect, where the top half of one face appears to fuse perceptually with the bottom half of another, when the two halves are aligned and presented upright (Hole, 1994;Young, Hellawell, & Hay, 1987). The resulting illusion-induced interference disrupts observers' ability to judge the identity (Young et al, 1987), physical resemblance (Hole, 1994), age (Hole & George, 2011), gender (Baudouin & Humphreys, 2006), and attractiveness (Abbas & Duchaine, 2008) of constituent face halves (for reviews see Murphy, Gray, & Cook, 2017;Rossion, 2013). When face halves are inverted, observers show little or no interference (McKone et al, 2013;Susilo, Rezlescu, & Duchaine, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Normal composite face effects in developmental prosopagnosia

Biotti

Yang

et al. 2017

Cortex

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Upright face perception is thought to involve holistic processing, whereby local features are integrated into a unified whole. Consistent with this view, the top half of one face appears to fuse perceptually with the bottom half of another, when aligned spatially and presented upright. This 'composite face effect' reveals a tendency to integrate information from disparate regions when faces are presented canonically. In recent years, the relationship between susceptibility to the composite effect and face recognition ability has received extensive attention both in participants with normal face recognition and participants with developmental prosopagnosia. Previous results suggest that individuals with developmental prosopagnosia may show reduced susceptibility to the effect suggestive of diminished holistic face processing. Here we describe two studies that examine whether developmental prosopagnosia is associated with reduced composite face effects. Despite using independent samples of developmental prosopagnosics and different composite procedures, we find no evidence for reduced composite face effects. The experiments yielded similar results; highly significant composite effects in both prosopagnosic groups that were similar in magnitude to the effects found in participants with normal face processing. The composite face effects exhibited by both samples and the controls were greatly diminished when stimulus arrangements were inverted. Our finding that the whole-face binding process indexed by the composite effect is intact in developmental prosopagnosia indicates that other factors are responsible for developmental prosopagnosia. These results are also inconsistent with suggestions that susceptibility to the composite face effect and face recognition ability are tightly linked. While the holistic process revealed by the composite face effect may be necessary for typical face perception, it is not sufficient; individual differences in face recognition ability likely reflect variability in multiple sequential processes.

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The composite face illusion

Cited by 65 publications

References 178 publications

Are the facial gender and facial age variants of the composite face illusion products of a common mechanism?

Are the facial gender and facial age variants of the composite face illusion products of a common mechanism?

Interaction between social categories in the composite face paradigm.

Normal composite face effects in developmental prosopagnosia

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