Mei Gaoxing, Chen Shiyu, Dong Bo
School of Psychology, Guizhou Normal University, Guiyang, China.
Department of Psychology, School of Education and Public Administration, Suzhou University of Science and Technology, Suzhou, China.
Front Psychol. 2019 Jul 11;10:1610. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01610. eCollection 2019.
The stability of face perception is vital in interpersonal interactions. Recent studies have revealed the mechanism of the stability in the perception of stable attributes of faces (such as facial identity) by serial dependence, a phenomenon in which perception of current stimuli is pulled toward recently viewed stimuli. However, whether serial dependence of perceived emotional expression (a changeable attribute of faces) exists remains controversial, and its exact nature has not been examined yet. To address these issues, we used the methods of constant stimuli and two-interval forced choice tasks in three psychophysical experiments. Participants compared two successive facial expressions selected from a continuum with 50 morphed faces ranging from sad to happy. Experiment 1a and 1b showed that a perceived facial expression pulled toward previously seen facial expressions (i.e., a significant serial dependence effect), independent of response instructions. Furthermore, a stronger serial dependence effect was found when the first facial expression was retained in working memory for a longer delay duration (Experiment 2), and yet a weaker serial dependence effect was observed when a longer delay between decision and response was performed (Experiment 3). These findings indicate that serial dependence facilitates the stability of facial expression perception and is modulated by working memory representations.
面部感知的稳定性在人际互动中至关重要。最近的研究揭示了通过序列依赖对面部稳定属性（如面部身份）感知稳定性的机制，序列依赖是一种当前刺激感知被拉向最近看到的刺激的现象。然而，对面部表情（面部的一个可变属性）的感知是否存在序列依赖仍存在争议，其确切性质尚未得到研究。为了解决这些问题，我们在三个心理物理学实验中使用了恒定刺激法和双间隔迫选任务。参与者将从包含50张从悲伤到快乐的变形面孔的连续体中选择的两个连续面部表情进行比较。实验1a和1b表明，感知到的面部表情会被拉向先前看到的面部表情（即显著的序列依赖效应），与反应指令无关。此外，当第一个面部表情在工作记忆中保持较长延迟时间时，发现序列依赖效应更强（实验2），而当决策和反应之间的延迟更长时，观察到序列依赖效应较弱（实验3）。这些发现表明，序列依赖促进了面部表情感知的稳定性，并受到工作记忆表征的调节。
