One distinctive feature of processing faces, as compared to other categories, is thought to be the large dependence on configural cues such as the metric relations among features. To test the role of low spatial frequencies (LSFs) and high spatial frequencies (HSFs) in configural and featural processing, subjects were presented with triplets of faces that were filtered to preserve either LSFs (below 8 cycles per face width), HSFs (above 32 cycles per face width), or the full frequency spectrum. They were asked to match one of two probe faces to a target face. The distractor probe face differed from the target either configurally, featurally, or both featurally and configurally. When the difference was at the configural level, performance was better with LSF faces than with HSF faces. In contrast, with a featural difference, a strong performance advantage was found for HSF faces as compared to LSF faces. These results support the dominant role that LSFs play in the configural processing of faces, whereas featural processing is largely dependent on HSFs.

The successful detection of biological motion can have important consequences for survival. Previous studies have demonstrated the ease and speed with which observers can extract a wide range of information from impoverished dynamic displays in which only an actor's joints are visible. Although it has often been suggested that such biological motion processing can be accomplished relatively automatically, few studies have directly tested this assumption by using behavioral methods. Here we used a flanker paradigm to assess how peripheral "to-be-ignored" walkers affect the processing of a central target walker. Our results suggest that task-irrelevant dynamic figures cannot be ignored and are processed to a level where they influence behavior. These findings provide the first direct evidence that complex dynamic patterns can be processed incidentally, a finding that may have important implications for cognitive, neurophysiological, and computational models of biological motion processing.

(2012) 'Modulation of the face-and body-selective visual regions by the motion and emotion of point-light face and body stimuli.', Neuroimage., 59 (2). pp. 1700-1712.Further information on publisher's website:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage. 2011.08.073 Publisher's copyright statement: NOTICE: this is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in NeuroImage. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A denitive version was subsequently published in NeuroImage, 59/2, 2012NeuroImage, 59/2, , 10.1016NeuroImage, 59/2, /j.neuroimage.2011 Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. This latter finding strongly constrains the claim that emotionally expressive movements modulate precisely those neuronal populations that code for the viewed stimulus category.