Effects of Spatial Frequencies on Recognition of Facial Identity and Facial Expression

Abstract

By changing configural or featural/category information, White (2002) revealed that configural changes mainly interfered with facial identity processing while featural alterations largely reduced facial expression processing. With this technique, Goffaux, Hault, Michel, Vuongo, and Rossion (2005) presented that low spatial frequency played in configural changes detection, whereas featural changes detection depended on high spatial frequency. Based on these two studies, we can draw a conclusion that low spatial frequency plays an important role in facial identity recognition while high spatial frequency plays in facial expression recognition. Can this conclusion be really supported by experiments? To test this hypothesis, we conducted three Gamer experiments in current study. In terms of the hypothesis, high spatial frequency enhances facial expression recognition but not facial identity recognition, while low spatial frequency facilitates facial identity recognition but not facial expression recognition. Dissociation could be found in recognition of facial identity and facial expression. Three Garner experiments were performed on 96 participants, with each 32 participants. In experiment 1, we measured Garner effect between facial identity and expression with full spatial face photos. In experiments 2, we complete the measurement on low spatial frequency filtered photos, and in experiment 3 the same measurement were made on high spatial frequency filtered face photos. 32 participants were recruited for each experiment. Results of experiment 1 indicated that obvious Garner effects were observed in either identity or expression recognition. In experiment 2, high spatial frequency enhanced facial expression recognition by lowering Garner effect, but it had no influence on facial identity recognition. In experiment 3, low spatial frequency exerted no obvious influence on either identity or expression recognition. Analysis of dissociability (measurement of Garner effect) and difficulty (measurement of selective reaction time in base line) showed that high spatial frequency selectively affected expression detection. In conclusion, high spatial frequencies were possibly used by us to distinguish facial expression information from identity information in hard-detected recognition task. Low spatial frequencies were easy to interact with both processing level and experimental task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)(journal abstract)