Gray Katie L H, Murphy Jennifer, Marsh Jade E, Cook Richard
School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, UK.
Department of Psychology, City, University of London, London, UK.
R Soc Open Sci. 2017 Apr 26;4(4):160867. doi: 10.1098/rsos.160867. eCollection 2017 Apr.
When upper and lower regions from different faces are aligned to form a facial composite, observers 'fuse' the two halves together, perceptually. The illusory distortion induced by task-irrelevant ('distractor') halves hinders participants' judgements about task-relevant ('target') halves. This composite-face effect reveals a tendency to integrate feature information from disparate regions of intact upright faces, consistent with theories of holistic face processing. However, observers frequently perceive emotion in ostensibly neutral faces, contrary to the intentions of experimenters. This study sought to determine whether this 'perceived emotion' influences the composite-face effect. In our first experiment, we confirmed that the composite effect grows stronger as the strength of distractor emotion increased. Critically, effects of distractor emotion were induced by weak emotion intensities, and were incidental insofar as emotion cues hindered image matching, not emotion labelling . In Experiment 2, we found a correlation between the presence of perceived emotion in a set of ostensibly neutral distractor regions sourced from commonly used face databases, and the strength of illusory distortion they induced. In Experiment 3, participants completed a sequential matching composite task in which half of the distractor regions were rated high and low for perceived emotion, respectively. Significantly stronger composite effects were induced by the high-emotion distractor halves. These convergent results suggest that perceived emotion increases the strength of the composite-face effect induced by supposedly emotionless faces. These findings have important implications for the study of holistic face processing in typical and atypical populations.
当将来自不同面孔的上部和下部区域对齐以形成面部合成图像时，观察者会在感知上把这两半“融合”在一起。由任务无关的（“干扰物”）半部所诱发的虚幻扭曲会妨碍参与者对任务相关的（“目标”）半部进行判断。这种合成面孔效应揭示了一种整合来自完整直立面孔不同区域特征信息的倾向，这与整体面部加工理论相一致。然而，观察者经常会在表面上中性的面孔中察觉到情绪，这与实验者的意图相悖。本研究旨在确定这种“察觉到的情绪”是否会影响合成面孔效应。在我们的第一个实验中，我们证实了随着干扰物情绪强度的增加，合成效应会变得更强。关键的是，干扰物情绪的效应是由微弱的情绪强度诱发的，并且就情绪线索妨碍图像匹配而非情绪标注而言，这些效应是附带产生的。在实验2中，我们发现从常用面部数据库中选取的一组表面上中性的干扰物区域中察觉到的情绪的存在，与它们所诱发的虚幻扭曲的强度之间存在相关性。在实验3中，参与者完成了一项顺序匹配合成任务，其中一半的干扰物区域在察觉到的情绪方面分别被评为高和低。高情绪干扰物半部诱发的合成效应明显更强。这些趋同的结果表明，察觉到的情绪会增强由表面上无表情的面孔所诱发的合成面孔效应。这些发现对于典型和非典型人群的整体面部加工研究具有重要意义。
