Colombatto Clara, Scholl Brian J
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada.
Department of Psychology and Wu Tsai Institute, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2025 Aug 13. doi: 10.3758/s13423-025-02739-w.
Some of the most foundational properties we can perceive from others' faces involve cognitive states, such as how attentive (vs. distracted) they seem - an important ability, since the likelihood of someone in our local environment affecting our fitness is enhanced when they are attentive. But how can we tell whether another person is attentive? This study reveals that the way in which we perceive attentiveness in others' faces is straightforward in some ways, but deeply counterintuitive in others. We explored this using reverse correlation, a data-driven approach that can reveal the nature of internal representations without prior assumptions. In two online studies (n = 200 each), observers viewed pairs of faces created by adding randomly generated noise (across many spatial frequencies) to a constant base face, and had to select which appeared to be most attentive. Analyses of automatically extracted facial landmarks from the resulting "classification images" revealed the determinants of perceived attentiveness. Some cues were straightforward: attentive faces indeed had more direct eye gaze, and larger pupils. But other novel and equally robust cues were subtle and surprising; for example, attentive faces reliably had darker (as if more flared, or retroussé) nostrils. These powerful and subtle effects of facial cues on impressions of attentiveness highlight the importance of attention not just as a perceptual process, but as an object of perception itself.
我们能从他人面部感知到的一些最基本特征与认知状态有关，比如他们看起来有多专注（与分心相对）——这是一项重要能力，因为当我们周围环境中的某个人专注时，其对我们健康状况产生影响的可能性就会增加。但我们如何判断另一个人是否专注呢？这项研究表明，我们感知他人面部专注度的方式在某些方面很直接，但在其他方面却极其违反直觉。我们使用反向相关法对此进行了探究，这是一种数据驱动的方法，能够在没有先验假设的情况下揭示内部表征的本质。在两项在线研究中（每项研究有200名参与者），观察者观看了通过在一张固定的基础面部上添加随机生成的噪声（涵盖多个空间频率）而创建的成对面部，并必须选择出看起来最专注的那张。对从由此产生的“分类图像”中自动提取的面部特征点进行分析，揭示了感知到的专注度的决定因素。一些线索很直接：专注的面部确实有更直接的目光注视和更大的瞳孔。但其他新颖且同样显著的线索却很微妙且令人惊讶；例如，专注的面部可靠地具有更暗的（好像更张开或朝天的）鼻孔。面部线索对专注度印象的这些强大而微妙的影响凸显了注意力不仅作为一种感知过程，而且作为感知对象本身的重要性。
