 |
Abstract Detail
|
Emotion recognition (sometimes) depends on horizontal orientations33.536, Sunday, May 12, 8:30 am - 12:30 pm, Vista Ballroom Carol Huynh1, Benjamin Balas1; 1Center for Visual and Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, North Dakota State University Face recognition depends critically on horizontal orientations (Dakin, 2009). Presently, we asked if facial emotion recognition also exhibits this dependency. We measured observersÂ’ performance at classifying happy and sad faces that were filtered to include predominantly horizontal information, predominantly vertical information, or both. In addition, we used picture-plane rotation (0 or 90 degrees) to dissociate image-based orientation energy from object-based orientation. We recruited participants to complete two emotion recognition experiments using orientation-filtered faces. In Experiment 1 (N=17), we measured the speed of correct emotion categorization using genuine happy/sad faces. In Experiment 2 (N=21), we used posed emotions to control for confounding features in genuine emotions (open/closed mouths). In both tasks, participants viewed stimuli in a fully randomized order for 2000ms each and classified facial emotion as quickly and accurately as possible. Picture-plane orientation varied across experimental blocks, and filter orientation, emotion, and open/closed mouth position (Experiment 2) were randomized within blocks. The results of Experiment 1 revealed main effects of emotion (p<0.001) and filter orientation (p<0.001), with longer response latencies to sad faces and vertically-filtered faces. We also obtained an interaction between emotion and filter orientation (p<0.01); vertical filtering only affected sad faces. In Experiment 2, we replicated the main effects of emotion and filter orientation, and observed main effects of mouth position (open < Back |