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The respective role of low and high spatial frequencies in supporting configural and featural processing of faces

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Goffaux, Valérie [UCL] Hault, Barbara [UCL] Michel, Caroline [UCL] Vuong, Quoc C Rossion, Bruno [UCL]

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.

Document type Article de périodique (Journal article) – Article de recherche – Comparative Study, Journal Article, Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Publication date 2005
Language Anglais
Journal information "Perception" - Vol. 34, no. 1, p. 77-86 (2005)
Peer reviewed yes
Publisher Pion Ltd. ((United Kingdom) [S.l.])
issn 0301-0066
e-issn 1468-4233
Publication status Publié
Affiliations UCL - MD/FSIO - Département de physiologie et pharmacologie
UCL - PSP/PSP - Faculté de psychologie et des sciences de l'éducation
MESH Subject Adult ; Analysis of Variance ; Cues ; Face ; Female ; Humans ; Male ; Psychophysics ; Reaction Time ; Recognition (Psychology) ; Sensitivity and Specificity ; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted ; Visual Perception - physiology
Links
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Bibliographic reference Goffaux, Valérie ; Hault, Barbara ; Michel, Caroline ; Vuong, Quoc C ; Rossion, Bruno. The respective role of low and high spatial frequencies in supporting configural and featural processing of faces. In: Perception, Vol. 34, no. 1, p. 77-86 (2005)
Permanent URL http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/12811