ABSTRACT

Previous research supports the categorical perception of faces on dimensions including emotion, identity, and gender. Two experiments using standard paradigms investigated whether facial disfigurement forms another perceptual category. In the Identification task, faces were presented in varying degrees of disfigurement for a simple disfigured / non-disfigured decision. As degree of disfigurement increased, the percentage of participants defining each image as disfigured increased non-linearly such that a cubic curve provided the best fit to the data, consistent with categorical perception (Experiment 1 and 2). In the ABX task, participants displayed superior discrimination between two faces when they crossed the category boundary between non-disfigured and disfigured (Experiment 1 and participants low in Disgust Sensitivity in Experiment 2). Participants high in Disgust Sensitivity (Experiment 2) showed a pattern that suggested the category boundary was shifted towards earlier perception of disfigurement. Overall, the results suggest categorical perception of facial disfigurement.

摘要

先前的研究支持在情感，身份和性别等维度上对面孔进行分类感知。使用标准范例进行的两个实验研究了面部容貌是否构成另一种感知类别。在“身份识别”任务中，以简单的已毁损/未毁损决策来显示不同程度毁容的面孔。随着毁容度的增加，将每张图像定义为毁容的参与者的百分比呈非线性增加，因此三次曲线最适合数据，与分类感知一致（实验1和2）。在ABX任务中，参与者越过未毁容和毁容之间的类别边界时，他们在两张面孔之间表现出较高的区分度（实验1和实验2中的厌恶敏感度较低的参与者）。厌恶敏感度较高的参与者（实验2）显示出一种模式，表明类别边界已朝着更早的毁容感转变。总体而言，结果表明对面部容貌有明显的认识。