Adaptation effects of highly familiar faces: Immediate and long lasting

Sustained effects of adaptation on the perception of familiar faces.

“…However, as Leopold and Bondar (2005) pointed out, adaptation to any visual stimulus is likely to affect neurons in not only the early stages but also the intermediate and late stages of the visual pathway, all of which may contribute to the aftereffect in one way or another. Such higher level contributions are also suggested by more recent findings in adaptation research based on the use of more complex stimuli, for example, natural images (Webster & Miyahara, 1997), artworks (Carbon, Ditye, & Leder, 2007;Carbon & Leder, 2006), body parts (Kovacs et al, 2006), and not least, faces (e.g., Carbon, Strobach, et al, 2007;Leopold, O'Toole, Vetter, & Blanz, 2001;Webster & MacLin, 1999). Faces are objects of tremendous social importance whose stimulus dimensions are subject to higher cognitive processing and usually cannot be found (or tested) in simpler visual materials (e.g., identity, emotional expression, attractiveness).…”

“…Distortion intervals were two pixels for Versions -1 to -4 (or ϩ1 to ϩ4, respectively); another step of 10 pixels was added in Versions -5 and ϩ5 to create particularly large distortions. Similar techniques have been used in other face adaptation or priming studies Carbon, Strobach, et al, 2007;Faulkner, Rhodes, Palermo, Pellicano, & Ferguson, 2002;Robbins et al, 2007); see Figure 1A for an illustration. Each celebrity was randomly allocated to one of three stimulus sets corresponding to the three levels of adaptation transfer: picture, identity, and novel.…”

“…The adaptation procedure was realized by employing a time-sensitive gender-decision task, which has already been proven to be an efficient means of generating pronounced adaptation effects (e.g., Carbon, Strobach, et al, 2007). In this specific task, participants were exposed to faces presented in different positions on the screen for variable durations, which meant that the participant had to maintain constant attention.…”

“…This results in a change of distance between the new, adapted face norm and individual exemplars. An increase in distance therefore causes the respective individual face to be perceived less typical than before whereas a decrease in distance leads to a more normal appearance Carbon, Strobach, et al, 2007;Hurlbert, 2001;Leopold et al, 2001;Rhodes & Jeffery, 2006;Webster et al, 2004;Webster & MacLin, 1999). Extending this idea, several norms could exist, reflecting different hierarchical levels of face representations, from an individual norm, against which single pictures of a specific individual are coded and norms for particular face subpopulations (e.g., male or female faces, faces of a specific ethnic group, etc.)…”

The Effect of Familiarity on Face Adaptation

“…For example, Carbon et al (2007) used an adaptation paradigm similar to Webster and MacLin's (1999), but with famous faces. They found that adaptation to a distorted famous face affected the subsequent perception of an undistorted image of that individual, be it the same or a different image.…”