Visual adaptation and face perception

The appearance of faces can be strongly affected by the characteristics of faces viewed previously. These perceptual after-effects reflect processes of sensory adaptation that are found throughout the visual system, but which have been considered only relatively recently in the context of higher lev...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological sciences 2011-06, Vol.366 (1571), p.1702-1725
Main Authors: Webster, Michael A., MacLeod, Donald I. A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation
Adaptation, Physiological
After-Effects
Color Vision
Colors
Colour Vision
Discrimination, Psychological
Emotional expression
Face
Face Perception
Facial Expression
Facial expressions
Form Perception
Humans
Identity
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Neural Coding
Neuropsychology
Photic Stimulation
Sensory discrimination
Sensory Thresholds
Visual perception
Visual Perception - physiology
Visual system
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Summary:The appearance of faces can be strongly affected by the characteristics of faces viewed previously. These perceptual after-effects reflect processes of sensory adaptation that are found throughout the visual system, but which have been considered only relatively recently in the context of higher level perceptual judgements. In this review, we explore the consequences of adaptation for human face perception, and the implications of adaptation for understanding the neural-coding schemes underlying the visual representation of faces. The properties of face after-effects suggest that they, in part, reflect response changes at high and possibly face-specific levels of visual processing. Yet, the form of the after-effects and the norm-based codes that they point to show many parallels with the adaptations and functional organization that are thought to underlie the encoding of perceptual attributes like colour. The nature and basis for human colour vision have been studied extensively, and we draw on ideas and principles that have been developed to account for norms and normalization in colour vision to consider potential similarities and differences in the representation and adaptation of faces.
ISSN:0962-8436
1471-2970
DOI:10.1098/rstb.2010.0360