Citation

Balas B, van Lamsweerde AE, Auen A, Saville A. Iperception 2017; 8(4): e2041669517723653.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/2041669517723653

PMID

28835814

PMCID

PMC5555512

Abstract

Face animacy perception is categorical: Gradual changes in the real/artificial appearance of a face lead to nonlinear behavioral responses. Neural markers of face processing are also sensitive to face animacy, further suggesting that these are meaningful perceptual categories. Artificial faces also appear to be an "out-group" relative to real faces such that behavioral markers of expert-level processing are less evident with artificial faces than real ones. In the current study, we examined how categorical processing of real versus doll faces was impacted by the face inversion effect, which is one of the most robust markers of expert face processing. We examined how explicit categorization of faces drawn from a real/doll morph continuum was affected by face inversion (Experiment 1) and also how the response properties of the N170 were impacted by face animacy and inversion. We found that inversion does not change the position or steepness of the category boundary measured behaviorally. Further, neural markers of face processing are equally impacted by inversion regardless of whether they are elicited by real faces or doll faces. On balance, our results indicate that inversion has a limited impact on the categorical perception of face animacy.

Language: en

Keywords

ERPs; animacy; categorical perception; expertise; face recognition