Kendall L N, Raffaelli Quentin, Kingstone Alan, Todd Rebecca M
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, V6T 1Z4 BC Canada.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2016;1(1):19. doi: 10.1186/s41235-016-0021-8. Epub 2016 Dec 12.
Iconic representations are ubiquitous; they fill children's cartoons, add humor to newspapers, and bring emotional tone to online communication. Yet, the communicative function they serve remains unaddressed by cognitive psychology. Here, we examined the hypothesis that iconic representations communicate emotional information more efficiently than their realistic counterparts. In Experiment 1, we manipulated low-level features of emotional faces to create five sets of stimuli that ranged from photorealistic to fully iconic. Participants identified emotions on briefly presented faces. Results showed that, at short presentation times, accuracy for identifying emotion on more "cartoonized" images was enhanced. In addition, increasing contrast and decreasing featural complexity benefited accuracy. In Experiment 2, we examined an event-related potential component, the P1, which is sensitive to low-level visual stimulus features. Lower levels of contrast and complexity within schematic stimuli were also associated with lower P1 amplitudes. These findings support the hypothesis that iconic representations differ from realistic images in their ability to communicate specific information, including emotion, quickly and efficiently, and that this effect is driven by changes in low-level visual features in the stimuli.
标志性表征无处不在；它们充斥着儿童卡通片，为报纸增添幽默，并为网络交流带来情感基调。然而，认知心理学尚未探讨它们所发挥的交际功能。在此，我们检验了这样一种假设，即标志性表征比写实性表征能更有效地传达情感信息。在实验1中，我们操控了情感面孔的低层次特征，以创建五组从照片写实到完全标志性的刺激物。参与者识别短暂呈现面孔上的情绪。结果表明，在短呈现时间下，识别更多“卡通化”图像上情绪的准确性提高了。此外，增加对比度和降低特征复杂性有利于提高准确性。在实验2中，我们研究了一种与事件相关的电位成分，即P1，它对低层次视觉刺激特征敏感。示意图刺激中较低水平的对比度和复杂性也与较低的P1波幅相关。这些发现支持了这样一种假设，即标志性表征在快速有效地传达特定信息（包括情感）的能力方面与写实图像不同，而且这种效应是由刺激物中低层次视觉特征的变化驱动的。
