No abstract

We present a new methodology for constructing face stimuli for psychological experiments based on silhouetted face profiles. Face silhouettes carry a number of theoretical and methodological advantages compared to more complex face stimuli and lend themselves to a simple yet powerful parameterization. In five behavioral studies, we show that face silhouettes are processed like regular face stimuli: They provide enough information for accurate gender judgments (Study 1), age estimations (Study 2), and reliable and cross-valid attractiveness ratings (Study 3). Furthermore, face silhouettes elicit an inversion effect (Study 4) and allow for remarkably accurate cross-identification with front-view photographs (Study 5). We then describe a shape-based parameterization that relies on a small set of landmark points and show that face silhouettes can be effectively represented in a 20-dimensional "silhouette face space" (Study 6). We show that in this physical space, distance from the center of the space corresponds to perceived distinctiveness (Study 7), confirming a key axiom in the formulation of the face space model. Finally, we discuss straightforward applications of the face silhouette methodology and address some limitations.

The human ventral visual stream contains regions that respond selectively to faces over objects. However, it is unknown whether responses in these regions correlate with how face-like stimuli appear. Here, we use parameterized face silhouettes to manipulate the perceived face-likeness of stimuli and measure responses in face-and object-selective ventral regions with high-resolution fMRI. We first use "concentric hyper-sphere" (CH) sampling to define face silhouettes at different distances from the prototype face. Observers rate the stimuli as progressively more face-like the closer they are to the prototype face. Paradoxically, responses in both face-and object-selective regions decrease as face-likeness ratings increase. Because CH sampling produces blocks of stimuli whose variability is negatively correlated with face-likeness, this effect may be driven by more adaptation during high face-likeness (low-variability) blocks than during low face-likeness (high-variability) blocks. We tested this hypothesis by measuring responses to matched-variability (MV) blocks of stimuli with similar face-likeness ratings as with CH sampling. Critically, under MV sampling, we find a face-specific effect: responses in face-selective regions gradually increase with perceived face-likeness, but responses in object-selective regions are unchanged. Our studies provide novel evidence that face-selective responses correlate with the perceived face-likeness of stimuli, but this effect is revealed only when image variability is controlled across conditions. Finally, our data show that variability is a powerful factor that drives responses across the ventral stream. This indicates that controlling variability across conditions should be a critical tool in future neuroimaging studies of face and object representation.

No abstract

People prefer to perceive the world as just; however, the everyday experience of undeserved events challenges this perception.The authors suggest that one way people rationalize these daily experiences of unfairness is by means of a compensatory bias. People make undeserved events more palatable by endorsing the notion that outcomes naturally balance out in the end--good, yet undeserved, outcomes will balance out bad outcomes, and bad undeserved outcomes will balance out good outcomes.The authors propose that compensatory biases manifest in people's interpretive processes (Study 1) and memory (Study 2). Furthermore, they provide evidence that people have a natural tendency to anticipate compensatory outcomes in the future, which, ironically, might lead them to perceive a current situation as relatively more fair (Study 3).These studies highlight an understudied means of justifying unfairness and elucidate the justice motive's power to affect people's construal of their social world.