School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia.
School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia.
Cognition. 2018 Nov;180:82-90. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.07.005. Epub 2018 Jul 10.
Our sense of where another person is looking depends upon multiple features of their face, relating to both the deviation of their eyes and the angle of their head. In this way, gaze direction is a higher-level perceptual property that is dependent on holistic processing of lower-level visual cues. A key paradigm in social perception research is sensory adaptation, which has been used to probe how properties like gaze direction are encoded in the visual system. Here we test whether sensory adaptation acts on higher-level, perceptual representations of gaze direction, or occurs to lower-level visual features of the face alone. To this end, participants were adapted on faces that evoke the Wollaston illusion, in which the direction that the face appears to look differs from its veridical eye direction. We compared across sets of images that were exactly matched in the lower-level features of the face image, but perceptually distinct due to differences in the conjunction of head and eye direction. The changes in participants' perception of gaze direction following adaptation were consistent with habituation having occurred to the perceived gaze direction of the Wollaston faces, where this is dependent on integration of eye direction and head direction, rather than to lower-level sensory features of the face alone. This constitutes strong evidence for adaptable representations of other people's gaze direction in the visual system that are abstracted from lower-level facial cues.
我们对他人注视方向的感知取决于其面部的多个特征，这些特征既与眼睛的偏差有关，也与头部的角度有关。这样，注视方向就是一种更高层次的知觉属性，依赖于对较低层次视觉线索的整体处理。社会感知研究中的一个关键范式是感觉适应，它被用来探究像注视方向这样的属性是如何在视觉系统中编码的。在这里，我们测试感觉适应是否作用于注视方向的更高层次、知觉表征，还是仅作用于面部的较低层次视觉特征。为此，参与者适应了引起沃拉斯顿错觉的面孔，在这种错觉中，面孔看起来的注视方向与其真实的眼睛方向不同。我们比较了在面孔的低层次特征完全匹配的图像集，但是由于头和眼睛方向的结合不同，这些图像在知觉上是不同的。参与者对注视方向的感知在适应后的变化与沃拉斯顿面孔的感知注视方向的习惯化一致，而这种习惯化取决于眼睛方向和头部方向的整合，而不仅仅是面孔的低层次感官特征。这为视觉系统中其他人的注视方向的可适应表示提供了有力的证据，这些表示是从较低层次的面部线索中抽象出来的。
