Horizontal face information is the main gateway to the shape and surface cues to familiar face identity

Helene Dumont, Alexia Roux-Sibilon and Valérie Goffaux

PLOS ONE, 2024, vol. 19, issue 10, 1-19

Abstract: Humans preferentially rely on horizontal cues when recognizing face identity. The reasons for this preference are largely elusive. Past research has proposed the existence of two main sources of face identity information: shape and surface reflectance. The access to surface and shape is disrupted by picture-plane inversion while contrast negation selectively impedes access to surface cues. Our objective was to characterize the shape versus surface nature of the face information conveyed by the horizontal range. To do this, we tracked the effects of inversion and negation in the orientation domain. Participants performed an identity recognition task using orientation-filtered (0° to 150°, 30° steps) pictures of familiar male actors presented either in a natural upright position and contrast polarity, inverted, or negated. We modelled the inversion and negation effects across orientations with a Gaussian function using a Bayesian nonlinear mixed-effects modelling approach. The effects of inversion and negation showed strikingly similar orientation tuning profiles, both peaking in the horizontal range, with a comparable tuning strength. These results suggest that the horizontal preference of human face recognition is due to this range yielding a privileged access to shape and surface cues, i.e. the two main sources of face identity information.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0311225 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 11225&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0311225

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0311225

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().