Laguesse Renaud, Rossion Bruno
Institut de Recherche en Sciences Psychologiques (IPSY), Institut de Neurosciences, Université de Louvain, Place Cardinal Mercier 10, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
Perception. 2013;42(10):1013-26. doi: 10.1068/p7534.
Compelling evidence that faces are perceived holistically or configurally comes from the composite face illusion: identical top halves of a face are perceived as being different if they are aligned with different bottom halves. The visual illusion disappears when the top and bottom face halves are spatially misaligned. Whether this is because the two halves no longer form a whole face (ie they form two segmented parts), or because of an increase in interfeatures distance in the misaligned condition (eg eyes-mouth distance) remains unclear. Here, thirty-four participants performed a delayed matching composite task in which the amount of spatial misalignment between face halves varied parametrically (from 8.33% of face width to 100%). The difference in performance between aligned and misaligned faces (ie the composite face effect) was already of full magnitude at the smallest level of misalignment. These results imply that a small spatial misalignment is sufficient to measure the composite face effect. From a theoretical standpoint, they indicate that it is the breaking of a whole configuration rather than the increase in relative distance between the face parts that explains the presence or absence of the composite face effect, clarifying an outstanding issue concerning the nature of holistic face perception.
如果一张面孔相同的上半部分与不同的下半部分对齐，它们会被感知为不同。当面孔的上半部分和下半部分在空间上未对齐时，这种视觉错觉就会消失。这是因为两半不再构成一张完整的面孔（即它们形成了两个分割的部分），还是因为在未对齐的情况下特征间距离增加（例如眼睛与嘴巴之间的距离），目前尚不清楚。在这里，34名参与者进行了一项延迟匹配合成任务，其中面孔两半之间的空间未对齐量呈参数变化（从面孔宽度的8.33%到100%）。在最小未对齐水平时，对齐面孔和未对齐面孔之间的表现差异（即合成面孔效应）就已经达到了最大程度。这些结果表明，小的空间未对齐足以测量合成面孔效应。从理论角度来看，它们表明是整体构型的破坏而非面孔部分之间相对距离的增加解释了合成面孔效应的存在与否，这澄清了一个关于整体面孔感知本质的突出问题。
