0000000000968046
AUTHOR
Glyn W. Humphreys
Compensatory strategies in processing facial emotions: evidence from prosopagnosia.
We report data on the processing of facial emotion in a prosopagnosic patient (H.J.A.). H.J.A. was relatively accurate at discriminating happy from angry upright faces, but he performed at chance when the faces were inverted. Furthermore, with upright faces there was no configural interference effect on emotion judgements, when face parts expressing different emotions were aligned to express a new emergent emotion. We propose that H.J.A.'s emotion judgements relied on local rather than on configural information, and this local information was disrupted by inversion. A compensatory strategy, based on processing local face parts, can be sufficient to process at least some facial emotions.
Configural information in gender categorisation.
International audience; The role of configural information in gender categorisation was Studied by aligning the top half of one face with the bottom half of another. The two faces had the same or different genders. Experiment I shows that participants were slower and made more errors in categorising the gender in either half of these composite faces when the two faces had a different gender, relative to control conditions where the two faces were nonaligned or had the same gender. This result parallels the composite effect for face recognition (Young et al. 1987 Perception 16 747 - 759) and facial-expression recognition (Calder et al. 2000 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perceptio…