Faces and bodies in person perception

Abstract

When we see a person approaching us on the street, can we attend to their face independently of the body and conversely, can we attend to their body, independently of their face? Or, is face and body information combined to form a whole person percept? To test these questions, we constructed a whole-person composite stimulus by aligning or misaligning the face from one person with the body from another. Pairs of aligned or misaligned face-body composites were presented sequentially to participants in a “same/different” task and discrimination difficulty was parametrically manipulated via a morphing procedure. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge the identity of the face and ignore the body. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to judge the identity of the body and ignore the face. In both experiments, we found a congruency effect where “same/different” discriminations to the cued portion (Experiment 1: face; Experiment 2: body) were influenced by information in the to-be-ignored uncued portion. The magnitude of the congruency effect increased as the discrimination decisions became more difficult. Critically, spatial alignment between the face and body did not affect the congruency effect; indicating that the integration of face and body information occurs at the decisional stage of processing rather than at the perceptual holistic encoding stage. Together, our results indicate that it is difficult to selectively attend to just the face or the body in person perception.