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How looking at someone you don't know can help you to recognize someone you do
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Boroditsky, Lera Winawer, Jonathan Witthoft, Nathan |
| Copyright Year | 2006 |
| Abstract | How Looking at Someone You Don’t Know Can Help You to Recognize Someone You Do Nathan Witthoft (witthoft@mit.edu) Jonathan Winawer (winawer@mit.edu) Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, 77 Mass Ave Cambridge, MA 02139 USA Lera Boroditsky (lera@psych.stanford.edu) Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 410 Jordan Hall Stanford, CA 53706 USA thought to be typical of neurons higher up in the visual hierarchy and the persistence of adaptation under these conditions is an indication of a relatively high level locus of adaptation. Most of these studies induce their effects in the laboratory using similar paradigms. For example, Mike Webster (1999) demonstrated adaptation to faces that had been distorted by either compressing or expanding a region between the eyes. Subjects were first shown faces spanning the continuum from expanded to contracted and asked to judge how normal the faces looked. Then subjects adapted to either a contracted or expanded face by staring at it for some time and then were again presented with the continuum of faces and asked to judge their normality. In between judgments of normality subjects again stared at the distorted face to maintain the adapted state (what is often referred to as top-up adaptation). Webster found that when subjects adapted to an expanded face, subsequent judgments were biased in such a way that slightly expanded faces looked normal and undistorted faces looked compressed. The effect is quite powerful and given sufficient adaptation can be seen by an observer on a single trial which is probably why there are few objections to the fact that the results are based on subjective report. One interpretation of this data is that the viewer’s representation of what is normal shifts towards recent experience and that judgments of normality are really comparisons to the normal point. So, when adapting to an expanded face, the neutral point begins to move towards that face and subsequent testing with what used to be normal will appear contracted. Using a similar paradigm, Leopold et al (2001) demonstrated identity specific aftereffects. They created a stimulus set based on the notion of a face space in which faces are coded with respect to a norm, that is the identity of a face is the distance from the center of the space on however many dimensions there are. Having a model of the space allowed them to do a very sophisticated experiment showing that when adapted to a particular face A, subjects were likely to judge neutral faces as having the identity of anti-A (that is the face opposite A in the face space). They further showed that this shift in judgments following adaptation was specific to the trajectory connecting a face Abstract Adaptation to faces has been shown to influence judgments of many different features of subsequently viewed faces. For example, after viewing a face that has had its internal features compressed, subjects report that the features of a normal face seem unnaturally expanded (Webster & MacLin, 1999). Recent work has extended these findings to identity, showing that the judgments of the identity of a neutral face can be biased by adaptation to another face (Leopold, D., O'Toole, A., Vetter, T., & Blanz, V., 2001). These results have been interpreted as supporting face- space models of recognition where faces are coded with respect to the prototype. While fascinating, these results require extensive training and depend on participants’ subjective reports. We present an objective method for demonstrating that adaptation can affect identity judgments without extensive training in the lab thus supporting the notion of identity based aftereffects. However, the fact that our stimuli are chosen without consideration of a face space suggests that there may be alternative mechanisms underlying face representation and adaptation that do not rely on a prototype. Introduction Perceptual adaptation and aftereffects have long interested psychologists both for the clues they provide about what kinds of features (and where) might be coded in the visual pathway and because they demonstrate the ways in which the visual system adjusts itself in response to experience. While many well known aftereffects have been described for ‘simple’ visual features like color and the orientation of lines more recent work has found that adaptation and aftereffects are found with more ‘complex’ stimuli such as shapes and faces (Feng & He 2005; Webster & MacLin 1999). Work on face adaptation in particular has shown that adaptation can bias many different kinds of judgments about faces including gender, normality, race, and emotion (Webster et al, 2004; Rhodes et al, 2004; Rhodes et al, 2003). It has also been shown that these adaptation effects are somewhat robust to changes in position, orientation, and size (Yamashita, J., Hardy, J., De Valois, K, & Webster, M., 2005; Zhao & Chubb, 2001; Leopold, D. A., Rhodes, G., Muller, K. M., & Jeffery, L., 2005). These invariances are |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 28 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt75s2j3b4/qt75s2j3b4.pdf?t=op3537 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/Proceedings/2006/docs/p894.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
