Abstract
Our visual system interprets myriad of visual stimuli from time to time precisely and automatically in an ensemble manner (Alvarez & Oliva, 2009), including high-level stimuli such as faces with expressions (Haberman & Whitney, 2009; Haberman, Harp & Whitney, 2009). Exposure to an emotional face can bias the judgment of facial expression of subsequently presented faces, the facial expression adaptation (Webster et al., 2004). Therefore, it is compelling to hypothesize that the exposure of a stream of faces could affect the perception of following faces as the average face of the stream does. In the present study, we tested whether adapting to the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP, 42.5Hz) of emotional faces could generate facial expression aftereffects as their paired averaged faces. Results from Experiment 1 showed that the RSVP of faces could generate significant emotion aftereffect across both happy and sad emotions (both p < .01). Experiment 2 further indicated there were no significant differences between the magnitudes of adaptation aftereffects from the RSVP of faces and the average faces (both p >.19). These results suggested that the facial expression aftereffects from the RSVP of emotional faces and the paired averaged face were equivalent. Thus, it supports the hypothesis that our visual system applies ensemble statistics in streams of faces exposed to, and such exposure affects our perception of face emotion subsequently.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016