The context effect in face matching: Effects of feedback

Abstract

Faces are perceived holistically, even when they are presented briefly (Hole, 1994; Richler, Mack, et al., 2009). Results obtained with a context congruency paradigm support dominance of holistic processing for brief timings, but indicate that larger viewing times enable observers to regulate contextual influences, and to use a feature selective focus (Meinhardt-Injac, Persike, & Meinhardt, 2010). Here we provide further evidence for this claim, and illuminate the role of feedback. With trial by trial feedback observers show poor performance in incongruent facial contexts at brief timings, but become quite effective in suppressing information that interferes with the correct judgements at larger viewing times. Without feedback they are still able to delimit the effects of conflicting contextual information, but are less effective. Adding further target features leads to moderate performance increase in incongruent contexts when there is no feedback, but to strong improvement when feedback is provided. These findings indicate that observers use opportunities of learning to replace holistic face perception by modes of active vision when sufficient temporal resources are available.

The complete design in the composite face paradigm: role of response bias, target certainty, and feedback

“…However, Meinhardt-Injac et al (2011) reported this function of feedback in controlling the contextual effects of external features on internal target features. There, subjects were able to use feedback for improvement in incongruent trials, while performance in congruent trials remained as good as that in the without feedback condition.…”

“…To make the perceptual account of the composite effect more explicit, one may conceive an ideal “holistic” observer who refers to a whole face as the smallest perceptual unit when exposed to natural and intact face stimuli. However, this notion is just an ideal, because human observers can take a part-based focus of facial stimuli (Meinhardt-Injac et al, 2010, 2011). As outlined above, this observer would yield a large congruency effect in the complete design.…”

“…Second, feedback about correctness can help the observer to control contextual influence, and to optimize attentional selection. In a recent study (Meinhardt-Injac et al, 2011) it was shown that observers were able to use trial-by-trial feedback to regulate the influence of irrelevant external context features on relevant internal features. Strong improvement in accuracy was observed compared to the no-feedback condition, indicating that feedback indeed helped observers to attend to the diagnostic features.…”

Development of Visual Systems for Faces and Objects: Further Evidence for Prolonged Development of the Face System

“…By comparing different age groups, our aim was to tap into the improvement of the visual processing ability for faces and watches as common non-face visual objects that share complexity and structure with faces [13]. For all age groups, the context congruency paradigm was employed as the experimental task [8], [9], [13]. Participants were required to judge internal features of two faces/watches as same or different, while ignoring the identity of the external features.…”

“…In this paradigm, the effects of context congruency (for short referred to as “context effect” – see also Methods Section) and orientation were used as measures of holistic and configural face processing, respectively. Variation of exposure duration provided hints on the strength of holistic and configural viewing at different processing stages [8], [9].…”