Rousselet Guillaume A, Macé Marc J-M, Fabre-Thorpe Michèle
Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition, CNRS-UPS UMR 5549, Toulouse, France.
J Vis. 2003;3(6):440-55. doi: 10.1167/3.6.5.
Object categorization can be extremely fast. But among all objects, human faces might hold a special status that could depend on a specialized module. Visual processing could thus be faster for faces than for any other kind of object. Moreover, because face processing might rely on facial configuration, it could be more disrupted by stimulus inversion. Here we report two experiments that compared the rapid categorization of human faces and animals or animal faces in the context of upright and inverted natural scenes. In Experiment 1, the natural scenes contained human faces and animals in a full range of scales from close-up to far views. In Experiment 2, targets were restricted to close-ups of human faces and animal faces. Both experiments revealed the remarkable object processing efficiency of our visual system and further showed (1) virtually no advantage for faces over animals; (2) very little performance impairment with inversion; and (3) greater sensitivity of faces to inversion. These results are interpreted within the framework of a unique system for object processing in the ventral pathway. In this system, evidence would accumulate very quickly and efficiently to categorize visual objects, without involving a face module or a mental rotation mechanism. It is further suggested that rapid object categorization in natural scenes might not rely on high-level features but rather on features of intermediate complexity.
物体分类可以极其迅速。但在所有物体中，人脸可能具有特殊地位，这可能取决于一个专门的模块。因此，视觉处理对人脸的速度可能比对其他任何类型物体的速度都要快。此外，由于面部处理可能依赖于面部构型，它可能更容易受到刺激反转的干扰。在此，我们报告两项实验，比较了在直立和倒置自然场景背景下，人类面孔与动物或动物面孔的快速分类。在实验1中，自然场景包含从特写镜头到远景的各种比例的人类面孔和动物。在实验2中，目标仅限于人类面孔和动物面孔的特写。两项实验都揭示了我们视觉系统卓越的物体处理效率，并进一步表明：（1）实际上人脸相对于动物没有优势；（2）反转对表现造成的损害很小；（3）人脸对反转更敏感。这些结果在腹侧通路中物体处理的独特系统框架内得到解释性。在这个系统中，证据会非常迅速且有效地积累起来以对视觉物体进行分类，而不涉及面部模块或心理旋转机制。进一步表明，自然场景中的快速物体分类可能不依赖于高级特征，而是依赖于中等复杂度的特征。
