title: Seeing Objects as Faces Enhances Object Detection.
abstract: The face is a special visual stimulus. Both bottom-up processes for low-level facial features and top-down modulation by face expectations contribute to the advantages of face perception. However, it is hard to dissociate the top-down factors from the bottom-up processes, since facial stimuli mandatorily lead to face awareness. In the present study, using the face pareidolia phenomenon, we demonstrated that face awareness, namely seeing an object as a face, enhances object detection performance. In face pareidolia, some people see a visual stimulus, for example, three dots arranged in V shape, as a face, while others do not. This phenomenon allows us to investigate the effect of face awareness leaving the stimulus per se unchanged. Participants were asked to detect a face target or a triangle target. While target per se was identical between the two tasks, the detection sensitivity was higher when the participants recognized the target as a face. This was the case irrespective of the stimulus eccentricity or the vertical orientation of the stimulus. These results demonstrate that seeing an object as a face facilitates object detection via top-down modulation. The advantages of face perception are, therefore, at least partly, due to face awareness.
authors.affiliation: Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
authors.forename: Kohske
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Takahashi
authors.affiliation: Department of Intermedia Art and Science, School of Fundamental Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan.
authors.forename: Katsumi
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Watanabe
keywords: Face perception; face awareness; face detection; face inversion effect; signal detection theory