Luo Chengwen, Burns Edwin, Xu Hong
Division of Psychology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Division of Psychology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Vision Res. 2017 Apr;133:21-36. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2016.12.018. Epub 2017 Feb 17.
Prolonged exposure to a happy face makes subsequently presented faces appear sadder: the facial emotion aftereffect (FEA). People with autism spectrum disorders and their relatives have diminished holistic perception of faces. Levels of autism can be measured continuously in the general population by autistic traits using the autism-quotient (AQ). Prior work has not found any association between AQ and FEA in adults, possibly due to non-holistic processing strategies employed by those at the higher end of the spectrum. In the present study, we tested whether AQ was associated with FEA to partially occluded faces. We hypothesized that inferring emotion from such faces would require participants to process their viewable parts as a gestalt percept, thus we anticipated this ability would diminish as autistic traits increased. In Experiment 1, we partially occluded the adapting faces with aligned or misaligned opaque bars. Both conditions produced significant FEAs, with aftereffects and AQ negatively correlated. In Experiment 2, we adapted participants to obscured faces flickering in luminance, and manipulated the facilitation of holistic perception by varying the synchronization of this flickering. We found significant FEAs in all conditions, but abolished its association with AQ. In Experiment 3, we showed that the association between AQ and FEA in the occluded conditions in Experiment 1 was not due to the recognizability or perceived emotional intensity of our adaptors; although the overall FEAs were linked to emotional intensity. We propose that increasing autistic traits are associated with diminishing abilities in perceiving emotional faces as a gestalt percept.
面部情绪后效（FEA）。自闭症谱系障碍患者及其亲属对面孔的整体感知能力有所下降。在普通人群中，可以使用自闭症商数（AQ）通过自闭症特征来连续测量自闭症程度。先前的研究尚未发现成年人的AQ与FEA之间存在任何关联，这可能是由于谱系高端人群采用了非整体加工策略。在本研究中，我们测试了AQ是否与部分遮挡面孔的FEA相关。我们假设从这些面孔推断情绪需要参与者将可见部分作为一个整体知觉来处理，因此我们预计随着自闭症特征的增加，这种能力会下降。在实验1中，我们用对齐或未对齐的不透明条部分遮挡适应面孔。两种条件都产生了显著的面部情绪后效，且后效与AQ呈负相关。在实验2中，我们让参与者适应亮度闪烁的模糊面孔，并通过改变这种闪烁的同步性来操纵整体感知的促进作用。我们在所有条件下都发现了显著的面部情绪后效，但消除了其与AQ的关联。在实验3中，我们表明实验1中遮挡条件下AQ与FEA之间的关联并非由于我们的适应刺激的可识别性或感知到的情绪强度；尽管整体面部情绪后效与情绪强度有关。我们提出，自闭症特征的增加与将情绪面孔作为一个整体知觉来感知的能力下降有关。
