Young A W, Hellawell D, Hay D C
Department of Psychology, University of Lancaster, Bailrigg, UK.
Perception. 1987;16(6):747-59. doi: 10.1068/p160747.
A new facial composites technique is demonstrated, in which photographs of the top and bottom halves of different familiar faces fuse to form unfamiliar faces when aligned with each other. The perception of a novel configuration in such composite stimuli is sufficiently convincing to interfere with identification of the constituent parts (experiment 1), but this effect disappears when stimuli are inverted (experiment 2). Difficulty in identifying the parts of upright composites is found even for stimuli made from parts of unfamiliar faces that have only ever been encountered as face fragments (experiment 3). An equivalent effect is found for composites made from internal and external facial features of well-known people (experiment 4). These findings demonstrate the importance of configurational information in face perception, and that configurations are only properly perceived in upright faces.
展示了一种新的面部合成技术，在该技术中，不同熟悉面孔的上半部分和下半部分的照片相互对齐时会融合形成不熟悉的面孔。这种合成刺激中新颖配置的感知足以令人信服地干扰对组成部分的识别（实验1），但当刺激颠倒时这种效果就会消失（实验2）。即使对于由仅作为面部碎片遇到过的不熟悉面孔的部分制成的刺激，识别直立合成物的部分也存在困难（实验3）。对于由知名人士的面部内部和外部特征制成的合成物也发现了类似的效果（实验4）。这些发现证明了构型信息在面部感知中的重要性，并且构型仅在直立面孔中才能被正确感知。
