Abstract
Face processing and recognition has been one of the most productive research areas in cognitive science over the past four decades, and in most studies images of real faces are the focus of inquiry. Due to the proliferation of technology in social media in recent years, we have witnessed a significant surge of using line-drawn faces and expressions along with their real-face counterparts for purpose of communication. In two experiments we examined how line-drawn faces may differ from real faces in terms of perceptual and emotional expression processing. In Experiment 1, we used the part-whole task and showed that, compared to real faces, line-drawn faces were processed in a part-based manner similar to non-face objects (i.e., houses). In Experiment 2, we tracked participants’ eye movements while they were asked to perform a delayed matching-to-sample task, in terms of expressed emotion, where images of either real or line-drawn faces were used as sample. The results indicated that while participants were more efficient at extracting expression-related information from real than from line-drawn face, the manner in which that information was extracted was actually quite similar between real and line-drawn faces. These findings might explain why it has become a common practice to exaggerate portrayed expression in line drawn faces: To overcome the inherently vague signals of emotional expression.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015