Friend effects framework: Contrastive and hierarchical processing in cheerleader effects

Alcohol Use Predicts Face Perception Impairments and Difficulties in Face Recognition

Background: Risky alcohol use is related to a variety of cognitive impairments, including memory and visuo-perceptual difficulties. Remarkably, no prior work has assessed whether usage of alcohol can predict difficulties perceiving facial identity. Objectives: Therefore, this study aimed to investigate whether riskier alcohol consumption predicted impairments in face perception and self-reported difficulties in face recognition. Results: Participants (N = 239, male = 77) were over 18 years old and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Alcohol use was assessed using the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT), while face recognition difficulties were determined by the 20-item Prosopagnosia Index questionnaire (PI20). A subsample of participants (N = 126, male = 51) completed the Cambridge Face Perception task (CFPT) to assess their face perception ability. Multiple linear regressions showed significant models of prediction on both face perception and face recognition when considering AUDIT score and age as predictors. Conclusion: This study suggested, for the first time, that risky alcohol use predicts both poorer visuo-perceptual processing for faces and self-reported difficulties in face recognition.

The background assimilation effect: Facial emotional perception is affected by surrounding stimuli

The perception of facial emotion is not only determined by the physical features of the face itself but also be influenced by the emotional information of the background or surrounding information. However, the details of such effect are not fully understood. Here, the authors tested the perceived emotion of a target face surrounded by stimuli with different levels of emotional valence. In Experiment 1, four types of objects were divided into three groups (negative, unpleasant flowers and unpleasant animals; mildly negative (neutral), houses; positive, pleasant flowers). In Experiment 2, three groups of surrounding faces with different social-emotional valence (negative, neutral, and positive) were formed with the memory of affective personal knowledge. The data from two experiments showed that the perception of facial emotion can be influenced and modulated by the emotional valence of the surrounding stimuli, which can be explained by assimilation: the positive stimuli increased the valence of a target face, while the negative stimuli comparatively decreased it. Furthermore, the neutral stimuli also increased the valence of the target, which could be explained by the social positive effect. Therefore, the process of assimilation is likely to be a high-level emotional cognition rather than a low-level visual perception. The results of this study may help us better understand face perception in realistic scenarios.

Modeling facial perception in group context from a serial perception perspective

By utilizing statistical properties and summary statistics, the visual system can efficiently integrate perception of spatially and temporally adjacent stimuli into perception of a given target. For instance, perception of a target face can either be biased positively toward previous faces (e.g. the serial dependence effect) or be biased negatively by surrounding faces in the same trial/space (e.g. spatial ensemble averaging). However, both aspects were investigated separately. As spatial and temporal processing share the same purpose to reduce redundancy in visual processing, if one statistical processing occurs, would the statistical processing in the other domain still exist or be discarded? We investigated this question by exploring whether serial dependence of face perception (of attractiveness and averageness) survives when the changed face perception in the group context occurs. The results of Markov Chain modeling and conventional methods suggested that serial dependence (the temporal aspect) co-occurs with changed face perception in the group context (the spatial aspect). We also utilized the Hidden Markov modeling, as a new mathematical method, to model statistical processing from both domains. The results confirmed the co-occurrence of temporal effect and changed face perception in the group context for both attractiveness and averageness, suggesting potentially different spatial and temporal compression mechanisms in high-level vision. Further modeling and cluster analysis further revealed that the detailed computation of spatially and temporally adjacent faces in the attractiveness and averageness processing were similar yet different among different individuals. This work builds a bridge to understanding mathematical principles underlying changed face perception in the group context from the serial perspective.

Ensemble perception without phenomenal awareness of elements

Humans efficiently recognize complex scenes by grouping multiple features and objects into ensembles. It has been suggested that ensemble processing does not require, or even impairs, conscious discrimination of individual element properties. The present study examined whether ensemble perception requires phenomenal awareness of elements. We asked observers to judge the mean orientation of a line-based texture pattern whose central region was made invisible by backward masks. Masks were composed of either a Mondrian pattern (Exp. 1) or of an annular contour (Exp. 2) which, unlike the Mondrian, did not overlap spatially with elements in the central region. In the Mondrian-mask experiment, perceived mean orientation was determined only by visible elements outside the central region. However, in the annular-mask experiment, perceived mean orientation matched the mean orientation of all elements, including invisible elements within the central region. Results suggest that the visual system can compute spatial ensembles even without phenomenal awareness of stimuli.

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

The human vision system can extract a stable representation of the always-changing visual world. However, the mechanism underlying such perceptual continuity remains unclear. A possible candidate is the serial dependence: visual perception of an object is positively biased toward the visual input from the recent past. Does the visual system use one pattern of serial dependence for general purposes? Or different patterns of serial dependence for different visual tasks? Because different social facial traits (e.g., trustworthiness and dominance) are dissociable, it is reasonable to assume that the perception of different facial characteristics would require different patterns of serial dependences. In this study, we examine the existence and the similarities of the serial dependence(s) in the evaluation of seven facial characteristics (i.e., attractiveness, trustworthiness, confidence, dominance, intelligence, age, and aggressiveness). The convergent evidence from conventional Derivative of Gaussian fitting and Markov Chain modeling demonstrated that (1) serial dependence exists in judgments of all seven social facial characteristic, (2) the serial dependences of them are highly similar, and (3) the serial dependence follows the efficient coding. Thus it is highly possible that there exists a general serial dependence mechanism for (at least high-level) vision processing. Moreover, we used the Markov Chain modeling to better describe the transitional pattern of serial dependence, which is a kind of Markov process. These findings may shed light on future works regarding serial dependence, as well as face perception.

Face processing predicts reading ability: Evidence from prosopagnosia

There is considerable interest in whether face and word processing are reliant upon shared or dissociable processes. Developmental prosopagnosia is associated with lifelong face processing deficits, with these cases providing strong support for a dissociation between face and word recognition in three recent papers (Burns et al., 2017; Rubino et al., 2016; Starrfelt et al., 2018). However, the sample sizes in each of these studies may have been too small to detect significant effects. We therefore combined their data to increase power and reassessed their results. While only a non-significant trend for reading impairments was found in prosopagnosia using a one-sample t-test, poorer face memory performance was correlated with slower reading speeds across prosopagnosia and control participants. Surprisingly, poorer face perception skills in prosopagnosia were associated with smaller word length effects. This suggests that while mild reading impairments exist in developmental prosopagnosia, there may be a trade-off between their residual face perception abilities and reading skill. A reanalysis of Hills and colleagues' (2015) acquired prosopagnosia data also revealed a positive relationship between words and faces: severe impairments in face recognition were related to poorer word processing. In summary, the developmental and acquired prosopagnosia literature supports models of visual perception that posit face and word processing are reliant upon broadly shared processes.