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What’s in a “face file”? Feature binding with facial identity, emotion, and gaze direction

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Abstract

A series of four experiments investigated the binding of facial (i.e., facial identity, emotion, and gaze direction) and non-facial (i.e., spatial location and response location) attributes. Evidence for the creation and retrieval of temporary memory face structures across perception and action has been adduced. These episodic structures—dubbed herein “face files”—consisted of both visuo–visuo and visuo–motor bindings. Feature binding was indicated by partial-repetition costs. That is repeating a combination of facial features or altering them altogether, led to faster responses than repeating or alternating only one of the features. Taken together, the results indicate that: (a) “face files” affect both action and perception mechanisms, (b) binding can take place with facial dimensions and is not restricted to low-level features (Hommel, Visual Cognition 5:183–216, 1998), and (c) the binding of facial and non-facial attributes is facilitated if the dimensions share common spatial or motor codes. The theoretical contributions of these results to “person construal” theories (Freeman, & Ambady, Psychological Science, 20(10), 1183–1188, 2011), as well as to face recognition models (Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, Biological Psychiatry, 51(1), 59–67, 2000) are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Note that by “low-level”, social psychologists refer to such attributes as gender, race, and age; these attributes are considered as “high-level” features by cognitive psychologists, who often study “low level” features such as color, shape, and orientation.

  2. In Kahneman’s et al. (1992) study, no strict distinction has been postulated between location and object.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Bernhard Hommel, Michael Ziessler and Elkan Akyürek for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. I would also like to thank Abirzion Shasha, Hadar Saadon, Shani Hangal, and Shani Hadar for helping with data collection.

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Correspondence to Daniel Fitousi.

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This study was not funded by any grant.

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Daniel Fitousi declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5, 6, 7 and 8.

Table 5 ANOVA results of Experiment 1
Table 6 ANOVA results of Experiment 2
Table 7 ANOVA results in Experiment 3
Table 8 ANOVA results in Experiment 4

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Fitousi, D. What’s in a “face file”? Feature binding with facial identity, emotion, and gaze direction. Psychological Research 81, 777–794 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-016-0783-0

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