Perceiving Animacy in Own-and Other-Species Faces

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Benjamin Balas¹  Amanda Auen¹ 

[1] Department of Psychology, North Dakota State University, United States;Center for Visual and Cognitive Neuroscience, North Dakota State University, United States

关键词: face recognition;    animacy perception;    perceptual learning;    social vision;    expertise;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00029

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Though artificial faces of various kinds are rapidly becoming more and more life-like due to advances in graphics technology ( Suwajanakorn et al., 2015 ; Booth et al., 2017 ), observers can typically distinguish real faces from artificial faces. In general, face recognition is tuned to experience such that expert-level processing is most evident for faces that we encounter frequently in our visual world, but the extent to which face animacy perception is also tuned to in-group vs. out-group categories remains an open question. In the current study, we chose to examine how the perception of animacy in human faces and dog faces was affected by face inversion and the duration of face images presented to adult observers. We hypothesized that the impact of these manipulations may differ as a function of species category, indicating that face animacy perception is tuned for in-group faces. Briefly, we found evidence of such a differential impact, suggesting either that distinct mechanisms are used to evaluate the “life” in a face for in-group and out-group faces, or that the efficiency of a common mechanism varies substantially as a function of visual expertise.

【 授权许可】

CC BY