Facial Expression Aftereffect Revealed by Adaption to Emotion-Invisible Dynamic Bubbled Faces

Visual adaptation is a powerful tool to probe the short-term plasticity of the visual system. Adapting to local features such as the oriented lines can distort our judgment of subsequently presented lines, the tilt aftereffect. The tilt aftereffect is believed to be processed at the low-level of the...

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Main Authors:	Luo, Chengwen, Wang, Qingyun, Schyns, Philippe G., Kingdom, Frederick A. A., Xu, Hong
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Public Library of Science 2015
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703136/

id	pubmed-4703136
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-47031362016-01-14 Facial Expression Aftereffect Revealed by Adaption to Emotion-Invisible Dynamic Bubbled Faces Luo, Chengwen Wang, Qingyun Schyns, Philippe G. Kingdom, Frederick A. A. Xu, Hong Research Article Visual adaptation is a powerful tool to probe the short-term plasticity of the visual system. Adapting to local features such as the oriented lines can distort our judgment of subsequently presented lines, the tilt aftereffect. The tilt aftereffect is believed to be processed at the low-level of the visual cortex, such as V1. Adaptation to faces, on the other hand, can produce significant aftereffects in high-level traits such as identity, expression, and ethnicity. However, whether face adaptation necessitate awareness of face features is debatable. In the current study, we investigated whether facial expression aftereffects (FEAE) can be generated by partially visible faces. We first generated partially visible faces using the bubbles technique, in which the face was seen through randomly positioned circular apertures, and selected the bubbled faces for which the subjects were unable to identify happy or sad expressions. When the subjects adapted to static displays of these partial faces, no significant FEAE was found. However, when the subjects adapted to a dynamic video display of a series of different partial faces, a significant FEAE was observed. In both conditions, subjects could not identify facial expression in the individual adapting faces. These results suggest that our visual system is able to integrate unrecognizable partial faces over a short period of time and that the integrated percept affects our judgment on subsequently presented faces. We conclude that FEAE can be generated by partial face with little facial expression cues, implying that our cognitive system fills-in the missing parts during adaptation, or the subcortical structures are activated by the bubbled faces without conscious recognition of emotion during adaptation. Public Library of Science 2015-12-30 /pmc/articles/PMC4703136/ /pubmed/26717572 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0145877 Text en © 2015 Luo et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Luo, Chengwen Wang, Qingyun Schyns, Philippe G. Kingdom, Frederick A. A. Xu, Hong
spellingShingle	Luo, Chengwen Wang, Qingyun Schyns, Philippe G. Kingdom, Frederick A. A. Xu, Hong Facial Expression Aftereffect Revealed by Adaption to Emotion-Invisible Dynamic Bubbled Faces
author_facet	Luo, Chengwen Wang, Qingyun Schyns, Philippe G. Kingdom, Frederick A. A. Xu, Hong
author_sort	Luo, Chengwen
title	Facial Expression Aftereffect Revealed by Adaption to Emotion-Invisible Dynamic Bubbled Faces
title_short	Facial Expression Aftereffect Revealed by Adaption to Emotion-Invisible Dynamic Bubbled Faces
title_full	Facial Expression Aftereffect Revealed by Adaption to Emotion-Invisible Dynamic Bubbled Faces
title_fullStr	Facial Expression Aftereffect Revealed by Adaption to Emotion-Invisible Dynamic Bubbled Faces
title_full_unstemmed	Facial Expression Aftereffect Revealed by Adaption to Emotion-Invisible Dynamic Bubbled Faces
title_sort	facial expression aftereffect revealed by adaption to emotion-invisible dynamic bubbled faces
description	Visual adaptation is a powerful tool to probe the short-term plasticity of the visual system. Adapting to local features such as the oriented lines can distort our judgment of subsequently presented lines, the tilt aftereffect. The tilt aftereffect is believed to be processed at the low-level of the visual cortex, such as V1. Adaptation to faces, on the other hand, can produce significant aftereffects in high-level traits such as identity, expression, and ethnicity. However, whether face adaptation necessitate awareness of face features is debatable. In the current study, we investigated whether facial expression aftereffects (FEAE) can be generated by partially visible faces. We first generated partially visible faces using the bubbles technique, in which the face was seen through randomly positioned circular apertures, and selected the bubbled faces for which the subjects were unable to identify happy or sad expressions. When the subjects adapted to static displays of these partial faces, no significant FEAE was found. However, when the subjects adapted to a dynamic video display of a series of different partial faces, a significant FEAE was observed. In both conditions, subjects could not identify facial expression in the individual adapting faces. These results suggest that our visual system is able to integrate unrecognizable partial faces over a short period of time and that the integrated percept affects our judgment on subsequently presented faces. We conclude that FEAE can be generated by partial face with little facial expression cues, implying that our cognitive system fills-in the missing parts during adaptation, or the subcortical structures are activated by the bubbled faces without conscious recognition of emotion during adaptation.
publisher	Public Library of Science
publishDate	2015
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703136/
_version_	1613520565987966976

Facial Expression Aftereffect Revealed by Adaption to Emotion-Invisible Dynamic Bubbled Faces

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