Pachai Matthew V, Bennett Patrick J, Sekuler Allison B
Brain Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland.
Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.
Perception. 2018 Apr;47(4):397-413. doi: 10.1177/0301006618754479. Epub 2018 Jan 19.
Horizontally oriented spatial frequency components are a diagnostic source of face identity information, and sensitivity to this information predicts upright identification accuracy and the magnitude of the face-inversion effect. However, the bandwidth at which this information is conveyed, and the extent to which human tuning matches this distribution of information, has yet to be characterized. We designed a 10-alternative forced choice face identification task in which upright or inverted faces were filtered to retain horizontal or vertical structure. We systematically varied the bandwidth of these filters in 10° steps and replaced the orientation components that were removed from the target face with components from the average of all possible faces. This manipulation created patterns that looked like faces but contained diagnostic information in orientation bands unknown to the observer on any given trial. Further, we quantified human performance relative to the actual information content of our face stimuli using an ideal observer with perfect knowledge of the diagnostic band. We found that the most diagnostic information for face identification is conveyed by a narrow band of orientations along the horizontal meridian, whereas human observers use information from a wide range of orientations.
水平方向的空间频率成分是面部识别信息的诊断来源，对该信息的敏感度可预测正立识别准确率和面部倒置效应的大小。然而，该信息传递的带宽以及人类调谐与这种信息分布的匹配程度尚未得到表征。我们设计了一个10选1的强制选择面部识别任务，其中正立或倒置的面部经过滤波以保留水平或垂直结构。我们以10°步长系统地改变这些滤波器的带宽，并用所有可能面部的平均值中的成分替换从目标面部移除的方向成分。这种操作创建了看起来像面部但在任何给定试验中包含观察者未知的方向带中的诊断信息的图案。此外，我们使用对诊断带具有完美知识的理想观察者，相对于我们面部刺激的实际信息内容来量化人类表现。我们发现，面部识别最具诊断性的信息由沿着水平子午线的窄带方向传递，而人类观察者使用来自广泛方向的信息。
