Home  About us  Contact
 

Face Stimuli (face + stimulus)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Medical Sciences50%

Selected Abstracts

A perceptual discrimination investigation of the own-race effect and intergroup experience

APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2006
Pamela M. Walker
Research over the past two decades has demonstrated that individuals are better at the recognition and discrimination of own- versus other-race faces. Recent evidence, however, supports an own-race effect at the level of perceptual encoding in adults. The current study examines the perceptual basis of the own-race effect in secondary students from two racially segregated communities (White and South Asian). The contact hypothesis is investigated, as other-race experience may influence other-race face perception. Face stimuli were generated by morphing together South Asian and White faces along a linear continuum. In a same/different perceptual discrimination task participants judged whether face stimuli were physically identical to, or different from, the original faces. Results revealed a significant own-race effect for the White participants only, wherein they were better at discriminating White relative to South Asian faces. Other-race individuating experience was found to predict the own-race effect, indicating that other-race experience influences other-race face perceptual expertise. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Mechanisms of face perception in humans: A magneto- and electro-encephalographic study

NEUROPATHOLOGY, Issue 1 2005
Shoko Watanabe
We have been studying the underlying mechanisms of face perception in humans using magneto- (MEG) and electro-encephalography (EEG) including (1) perception by viewing the static face, (2) differences in perception by viewing the eyes and whole face, (3) the face inversion effect, (4) the effect of gaze direction, (5) perception of eye motion, (6) perception of mouth motion, and (7) the interaction between auditory and visual stimuli related to the vowel sounds. In this review article, we mainly summarize our results obtained on 3, 5, and 6 above. With the presentation of both upright and inverted unfamiliar faces, the inferior temporal cortex (IT) centered on the fusiform gyrus, and the lateral temporal cortex (LT) near the superior temporal sulcus were activated simultaneously, but independently, between 140 and 200 ms post-stimulus. The right hemisphere IT and LT were both active in all subjects, and those in the left hemisphere in half of the subjects. Latencies with inverted faces relative to those with upright faces were longer in the right hemisphere, and shorter in the left hemisphere. Since the activated regions under upright and those under inverted face stimuli did not show a significant difference, we consider that differences in processing upright versus inverted faces are attributable to temporal processing differences rather than to processing of information by different brain regions. When viewing the motion of the mouth and eyes, a large clear MEG component, 1M (mean peak latency of approximately 160 ms), was elicited to both mouth and eye movement, and was generated mainly in the occipito-temporal border, at human MT/V5. The 1M to mouth movement and the 1M to eye movement showed no significant difference in amplitude or generator location. Therefore, our results indicate that human MT/V5 is active in the perception of both mouth and eye motion, and that the perception of movement of facial parts is probably processed similarly. [source]

A perceptual discrimination investigation of the own-race effect and intergroup experience

APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2006
Pamela M. Walker
Research over the past two decades has demonstrated that individuals are better at the recognition and discrimination of own- versus other-race faces. Recent evidence, however, supports an own-race effect at the level of perceptual encoding in adults. The current study examines the perceptual basis of the own-race effect in secondary students from two racially segregated communities (White and South Asian). The contact hypothesis is investigated, as other-race experience may influence other-race face perception. Face stimuli were generated by morphing together South Asian and White faces along a linear continuum. In a same/different perceptual discrimination task participants judged whether face stimuli were physically identical to, or different from, the original faces. Results revealed a significant own-race effect for the White participants only, wherein they were better at discriminating White relative to South Asian faces. Other-race individuating experience was found to predict the own-race effect, indicating that other-race experience influences other-race face perceptual expertise. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Newborns' Mooney-Face Perception

INFANCY, Issue 6 2009
Irene Leo
The aim of this study is to investigate whether newborns detect a face on the basis of a Gestalt representation based on first-order relational information (i.e., the basic arrangement of face features) by using Mooney stimuli. The incomplete 2-tone Mooney stimuli were used because they preclude focusing both on the local features (i.e., the fine details of the individual features) and on the second-order relational information (i.e., the distance between the internal elements); therefore, face detection can rely only on a Gestalt representation of a face. Two experiments were carried out by using a preferential looking procedure. Experiment 1 demonstrated that newborns prefer upright Mooney faces to inverted Mooney faces (180° rotated). Experiment 2 showed that newborns prefer a Mooney face as compared to a Mooney-like object equated for the number of elements in the upper part. Overall, the results indicate that newborns bind and organize the fragmentary parts of the Mooneized face stimulus into a whole and detect the first-order relations of a face on the basis of holistic processing. [source]