Thoma Volker, Ward Neil, de Fockert Jan W
School of Psychology, University of East London London, UK.
Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London London, UK.
Front Psychol. 2016 Sep 27;7:1470. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01470. eCollection 2016.
Previous research using flanker paradigms suggests that peripheral distracter faces are automatically processed when participants have to classify a single central familiar target face. These distracter interference effects disappear when the central task contains additional anonymous (non-target) faces that load the search for the face target, but not when the central task contains additional non-face stimuli, suggesting there are face-specific capacity limits in visual processing. Here we tested whether manipulating the format of non-target faces in the search task affected face-specific capacity limits. Experiment 1 replicated earlier findings that a distracter face is processed even in high load conditions when participants looked for a target name of a famous person among additional names (non-targets) in a central search array. Two further experiments show that when targets and non-targets were faces (instead of names), however, distracter interference was eliminated under high load-adding non-target faces to the search array exhausted processing capacity for peripheral faces. The novel finding was that replacing non-target faces with images that consisted of two horizontally misaligned face-parts reduced distracter processing. Similar results were found when the polarity of a non-target face image was reversed. These results indicate that face-specific capacity limits are not determined by the configural properties of face processing, but by face parts.
以往使用侧翼范式的研究表明，当参与者必须对单个中央熟悉的目标面孔进行分类时，外周干扰面孔会被自动处理。当中央任务包含加载对面孔目标搜索的额外匿名（非目标）面孔时，这些干扰效应会消失，但当中央任务包含额外的非面孔刺激时则不会消失，这表明视觉处理中存在特定于面孔的容量限制。在这里，我们测试了在搜索任务中操纵非目标面孔的格式是否会影响特定于面孔的容量限制。实验1重复了早期的发现，即当参与者在中央搜索阵列中的额外名字（非目标）中寻找名人的目标名字时，即使在高负荷条件下，干扰面孔也会被处理。然而，另外两个实验表明，当目标和非目标都是面孔（而不是名字）时，在高负荷下干扰被消除了——向搜索阵列中添加非目标面孔耗尽了外周面孔的处理能力。新发现是，用由两个水平错位的面部部分组成的图像替换非目标面孔会减少干扰处理。当非目标面孔图像的极性反转时也发现了类似的结果。这些结果表明，特定于面孔的容量限制不是由面孔处理的构型属性决定的，而是由面部部分决定的。
