Face perception inherits low-level binocular adaptation

Journal of Vision

article

Keith A. May¹  Li Zhaoping² 

[1] Department of Psychology, University of Essex;UCL Department of Computer Science, University College London;Present addresses: Center for Integrative Neuroscience, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, and Department of Sensory and Sensorimotor Systems, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

关键词: vision;    perception;    psychophysics;    faceperception;    adaptation;    binocular integration;   

DOI  :  10.1167/19.7.7

来源: Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology

【 摘 要 】

In previous work (May & Zhaoping, 2016; May, Zhaoping,& Hibbard, 2012), we have provided evidence that thevisual system efficiently encodes binocular informationusing separately adaptable binocular summation anddifferencing channels. In that work, binocular test stimulidelivered different grating patterns to the two binocularchannels; selective adaptation of one of the binocularchannels made participants more likely to see the otherchannel’s grating pattern. In the current study, weextend this paradigm to face perception. Our test stimulidelivered different face images to the two binocularchannels, and we found that selective adaptation of onebinocular channel biased the observer to perceive theother channel’s face image. We show that the perceivedidentity, gender, emotional expression, or direction of 3-D rotation of a facial test image can be influenced bypre-exposure to binocular random-noise patterns thatcontain no meaningful spatial structure. Our resultsprovide compelling evidence that face-processingmechanisms can inherit adaptation from low-level sites.Our adaptation paradigm targets the low-levelmechanisms in such a way that any response bias orinadvertent adaptation of high-level mechanismsselective for face categories would reduce, rather thanproduce, the measured effects of adaptation.

【 授权许可】

CC BY|CC BY-NC-ND