title: Misaligned and Polarity-Reversed Faces Determine Face-specific Capacity Limits.
abstract: Previous research using flanker paradigms suggests that peripheral distracter faces are automatically processed when participants have to classify a single central familiar target face. These distracter interference effects disappear when the central task contains additional anonymous (non-target) faces that load the search for the face target, but not when the central task contains additional non-face stimuli, suggesting there are face-specific capacity limits in visual processing. Here we tested whether manipulating the format of non-target faces in the search task affected face-specific capacity limits. Experiment 1 replicated earlier findings that a distracter face is processed even in high load conditions when participants looked for a target name of a famous person among additional names (non-targets) in a central search array. Two further experiments show that when targets and non-targets were faces (instead of names), however, distracter interference was eliminated under high load-adding non-target faces to the search array exhausted processing capacity for peripheral faces. The novel finding was that replacing non-target faces with images that consisted of two horizontally misaligned face-parts reduced distracter processing. Similar results were found when the polarity of a non-target face image was reversed. These results indicate that face-specific capacity limits are not determined by the configural properties of face processing, but by face parts.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of East London London, UK.
authors.forename: Volker
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Thoma
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of East London London, UK.
authors.forename: Neil
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ward
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London London, UK.
authors.forename: Jan W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: de Fockert
keywords: attention; capacity limits; face perception; flanker paradigm; holistic processing; perceptual load; polarity reversal