Abrosoft Face Mixer 3 Serial 12
Download --->>> https://urluso.com/2ts2vC
Serial dependence is a perceptual bias where current perception is biased towards prior visual input. This bias occurs when perceiving visual attributes, such as facial identity, and has been argued to play an important functional role in vision, stabilising the perception of objects through integration. In face identity recognition, this bias could assist in building stable representations of facial identity. If so, then individual variation in serial dependence could contribute to face recognition ability. To investigate this possibility, we measured both the strength of serial dependence and the range over which individuals showed this bias (the tuning) in 219 adults, using a new measure of serial dependence of facial identity. We found that better face recognition was associated with stronger serial dependence and narrower tuning, that is, showing serial dependence primarily when sequential faces were highly similar. Serial dependence tuning was further found to be a significant predictor of face recognition abilities independently of both object recognition and face identity aftereffects. These findings suggest that the extent to which serial dependence is used selectively for similar faces is important to face recognition. Our results are consistent with the view that serial dependence plays a functional role in face recognition.
Serial dependence has been found for the perception of a variety of visual characteristics and objects, leading to suggestions that this bias reflects a general visual processing principle20. In low-level vision, serial dependence has been found for stimuli orientation18,22,24,25 and numerosity26. Recent studies show that serial dependence extends to behaviourally relevant and complex objects, like bodies27,28 and faces. Within faces, serial dependence has been found for judgments of attractiveness29,30,31, gender32 and facial identity33,34.
If stability is important for face identity recognition, then we might predict that stronger serial dependence would be linked with better face identity recognition skills. Two lines of research support this position. First, there is evidence that serial dependence operates on stable attributes rather than more changeable ones. Face identity is a stable attribute of a face that does not change from moment to moment within an individual (along with gender and attractiveness), in contrast to other, more changeable, aspects of a face that can vary often and quickly (such as expression and eye gaze). When individuals are required to judge the gender and expression of a face simultaneously, gender was biased towards the previous face while expression was biased away from the previous face, suggesting that it may be better to integrate more stable attributes through serial dependence and maximise sensitivity to change for more changeable attributes through aftereffects32. As serial dependence appears to selectively operate on stable attributes, it may be that integration is functionally beneficial to recognising stable attributes over more changeable ones.
However, it is also possible that stronger serial dependence could make it more difficult for an individual to recognise an identity. As noted earlier, better face recognition abilities are associated with stronger face identity aftereffects. That is, a stronger bias to perceive two consecutive face stimuli as different is associated with better face recognition skills. This bias can be thought of as facilitating discrimination between individuals, which is also crucial for face recognition. In contrast when individual identities are assimilated via the process of serial dependence, the fine details that make a face more distinct may be lost through this integration process, such that serial dependence may make individual discrimination more difficult. This integration may be particularly problematic when integrating stimuli that are more distinct and dissimilar and has been suggested to result in large errors in estimation19, and could potentially result in the fine details needed to tell individuals apart being integrated and smoothed over. Therefore, if individuals integrate identities that are more distinct from one another, this could be problematic for recognition.
Therefore, to understand the functional role of serial dependence it is important to not only consider the strength of serial dependence, but also how the strength of this bias varies depending on the difference between consecutive stimuli. Cicchini et al.19 recently showed that serial dependence for orientation is strongest when two sequential stimuli are more similar to one another, as well as when the stimuli are more ambiguous (and individuals are less certain about the properties of the stimuli that they are asked to judge). This evidence suggests that serial dependence (for both orientation and body perception) may be tuned to the degree of similarity between successive stimuli, operating most strongly when stimuli are very similar19,27. This leads to the possibility that there may be individual differences in the tuning of serial dependence, so that having narrower tuning (i.e., predominantly using serial dependence for more similar stimuli) may benefit face recognition, while having broader tuning (i.e., using serial dependence for all stimuli regardless of their similarity) may make it more difficult to discriminate and recognise faces.
While as a group, participants showed a non-linear pattern of serial dependence, individual participants varied in their use of serial dependence (see Fig. 2 for examples). For example, while both participants in Fig. 2 show a similar strength of serial dependence, they differ substantially in the range across which serial dependence occurs. Some individuals showed a pattern of stronger serial dependence when Face 1 and Face 2 were more similar, and weaker serial dependence when the faces were less similar (Fig. 2a). Others showed a pattern of serial dependence that scaled linearly with face dissimilarity, in that use of serial dependence increased as face dissimilarity increased (Fig. 2b). Therefore, we calculated a tuning value to characterise the range that each individual used serial dependence depending on how similar Face 1 and 2 were. This value quantified whether serial dependence was greatest for more similar stimuli, or whether it was used across a broader range of faces and the extent that this occurred. The tuning value (SDFI_tuning) was calculated by subtracting the gradient for the dissimilar faces (calculated by fitting a linear regression to the proportion of Jon/Sue responses on the 24% trials) from the gradient for the similar faces (12%). A larger, positive tuning value indicates that there is greater serial dependence for similar faces than dissimilar faces (narrower tuning, see Fig. 2a) and a value closer to 0 or a negative value indicates serial dependence increased as dissimilarity increased (broader tuning, see Fig. 2b).
Our results show that individual differences in serial dependence of facial identity are associated with variation in face recognition abilities. Both serial dependence strength and tuning showed significant associations, of small to moderate size42, with face recognition abilities. The relationship between serial dependence tuning and face recognition was further found to be significantly stronger than the relationship between this bias and object recognition. Serial dependence tuning was additionally found to be a significant and unique predictor of face recognition abilities, independently of both object recognition ability and face identity aftereffects. Overall, we found that the degree to which an individual showed stronger serial dependence for more similar over less similar faces predicted face recognition abilities.
Our results showed no significant association between serial dependence of facial identity (strength or tuning) and face identity aftereffects. Both perceptual biases were also found to contribute independently to face recognition abilities. These results raise the possibility that serial dependence of facial identity and face identity aftereffects may be independent processes. However, we are unable to make strong conclusions regarding the independence of these perceptual biases because the reliability for both tasks is not ideal and there was a numerically small, although not significant, relationship between serial dependence tuning and face identity aftereffects.
Previously, research has suggested that the contribution of face identity aftereffects to face recognition can be considered relatively specific to face recognition and not general object recognition abilities3,4,5. We found similar results for serial dependence, in that serial dependence strength and tuning were significantly related to face recognition abilities but not general object recognition ability. For serial dependence tuning, this relationship was further found to be significantly stronger than the relationship between tuning and object recognition. Further, serial dependence tuning was still found to be a significant predictor of face recognition abilities when general object recognition was controlled for. If serial dependence of facial identity was a more general process that benefited all kinds of object recognition, we would have expected it to also be associated with object recognition. Given that we found no significant relationship between serial dependence and object recognition, our results suggest that serial dependence of facial identity, like face identity aftereffects, may be operating on the level of facial identity specifically, rather than operating on all stimuli in general.
Our results raise the possibility that serial dependence of facial identity may be altered in individuals with poorer face recognition abilities, such as those with prosopagnosia or autism, as has been found with face identity aftereffects44,45. It is unkno