Matheson H E, Bilsbury T G, McMullen P A
Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada.
Can J Exp Psychol. 2012 Mar;66(1):51-62. doi: 10.1037/a0026062. Epub 2011 Dec 12.
A large body of research suggests that faces are processed by a specialized mechanism within the human visual system. This specialized mechanism is made up of subprocesses (Maurer, LeGrand, & Mondloch, 2002). One subprocess, called second- order relational processing, analyzes the metric distances between face parts. Importantly, it is well established that other-race faces and contrast-reversed faces are associated with impaired performance on numerous face processing tasks. Here, we investigated the specificity of second-order relational processing by testing how this process is applied to faces of different race and photographic contrast. Participants completed a feature displacement discrimination task, directly measuring the sensitivity to second-order relations between face parts. Across three experiments we show that, despite absolute differences in sensitivity in some conditions, inversion impaired performance in all conditions. The presence of robust inversion effects for all faces suggests that second-order relational processing can be applied to faces of different race and photographic contrast.
大量研究表明，面孔由人类视觉系统中的一种专门机制进行处理。这种专门机制由多个子过程组成（莫勒、勒格朗和蒙德洛克，2002年）。其中一个子过程称为二阶关系处理，它分析面部各部分之间的度量距离。重要的是，众所周知，其他种族面孔和对比度反转面孔在众多面孔处理任务中表现受损。在此，我们通过测试该过程如何应用于不同种族和照片对比度的面孔，来研究二阶关系处理的特异性。参与者完成了一项特征位移辨别任务，直接测量对面部各部分之间二阶关系的敏感度。在三个实验中，我们表明，尽管在某些条件下敏感度存在绝对差异，但反转在所有条件下都会损害表现。所有面孔都存在强烈的反转效应，这表明二阶关系处理可应用于不同种族和照片对比度的面孔。
