Wang Hailing, Ip Chengteng, Fu Shimin, Sun Pei
Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
Neuropsychologia. 2017 May;99:306-313. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.03.017. Epub 2017 Mar 18.
Face recognition theories suggest that our brains process invariant (e.g., gender) and changeable (e.g., emotion) facial dimensions separately. To investigate whether these two dimensions are processed in different time courses, we analyzed the selection negativity (SN, an event-related potential component reflecting attentional modulation) elicited by face gender and emotion during a feature selective attention task. Participants were instructed to attend to a combination of face emotion and gender attributes in Experiment 1 (bi-dimensional task) and to either face emotion or gender in Experiment 2 (uni-dimensional task). The results revealed that face emotion did not elicit a substantial SN, whereas face gender consistently generated a substantial SN in both experiments. These results suggest that face gender is more sensitive to feature-selective attention and that face emotion is encoded relatively automatically on SN, implying the existence of different underlying processing mechanisms for invariant and changeable facial dimensions.
人脸识别理论表明，我们的大脑分别处理不变的（如性别）和可变的（如情绪）面部维度。为了研究这两个维度是否在不同的时间进程中被处理，我们分析了在特征选择性注意任务中，面部性别和情绪引发的选择负波（SN，一种反映注意调节的事件相关电位成分）。在实验1（二维任务）中，参与者被要求关注面部情绪和性别属性的组合，在实验2（一维任务）中，参与者被要求关注面部情绪或性别。结果显示，面部情绪并未引发显著的SN，而面部性别在两个实验中均持续产生显著的SN。这些结果表明，面部性别对特征选择性注意更敏感，而面部情绪在SN上相对自动地被编码，这意味着不变和可变面部维度存在不同的潜在加工机制。
