Visual processing is thought to function in a coarse-to-fine manner. Low spatial frequencies, conveying coarse information, would be processed early to generate predictions. These LSF-based predictions would facilitate the further integration of high spatial frequencies, conveying fine details. The predictive role of LSF might be crucial in automatic face processing, where high performance could be explained by an accurate selection of clues in early processing. In the present study, we used a visual Mismatch Negativity paradigm by presenting an unfiltered face (...) as standard stimulus, and the same face filtered in LSF or HSF as deviant, to investigate the predictive role of LSF vs. HSF during automatic face processing. If LSF are critical for predictions, we hypothesize that LSF deviants would elicit less prediction error than HSF deviants. Results show that both LSF and HSF deviants elicited a mismatch response compared with their equivalent in an equiprobable sequence. However, in line with our hypothesis, LSF deviants evoke significantly reduced mismatch responses compared to HSF deviants, particularly at later stages. The difference in mismatch between HSF and LSF conditions involves posterior areas and right fusiform gyrus. Overall, our findings suggest a predictive role of LSF during automatic face processing and a critical involvement of HSF in the fusiform during the conscious detection of changes in faces. (shrink)

Configural face processing precedes featural face processing under the face-attended condition, but their temporal sequence in the absence of attention is unclear. The present study investigated this issue by recording visual mismatch negativity, which indicates the automatic processing of visual information under unattended conditions. Participants performed a central cross size change detection task, in which random sequences of faces were presented peripherally, in an oddball paradigm. In Experiment 1, configural and featural faces were presented infrequently among original faces. In Experiment (...) 2, configural faces were presented infrequently among featural faces, or vice versa. The occipital-temporal vMMN emerged in the 200–360 ms latency range for configural, but not featural, face information. More specifically, configural face information elicited a substantial vMMN component in the 200–360 ms range in Experiment 1. This result was replicated in the 320–360 ms range in Experiment 2, especially in the right hemisphere. These results suggest that configural, but not featural, face information is associated with automatic processing and provides new electrophysiological evidence for the different mechanisms underlying configural and featural face processing under unattended conditions. (shrink)

A growing body of recent research suggests that verbal categories, particularly labels, impact categorization and perception. These findings are commonly interpreted as demonstrating the involvement of language on cognition; however, whether these assumptions hold true for grammatical structures has yet to be investigated. In the present study, we investigated the extent to which linguistic information, namely, grammatical gender categories, structures cognition to subsequently influence categorical judgments and perception. In a nonverbal categorization task, French–English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers made gender‐associated (...) judgments about a set of image pairs while event‐related potentials were recorded. The image sets were composed of an object paired with either a female or male face, wherein the object was manipulated for their conceptual gender relatedness and grammatical gender congruency to the sex of the following target face. The results showed that grammatical gender modulated the N1 and P2/VPP, as well as the N300 exclusively for the French–English bilinguals, indicating the inclusion of language in the mechanisms associated with attentional bias and categorization. In contrast, conceptual gender information impacted the monolingual English speakers in the later N300 time window given the absence of a comparable grammatical feature. Such effects of grammatical categories in the early perceptual stream have not been found before, and further provide grounds to suggest that language shapes perception. (shrink)

Change blindness experiments had demonstrated that detection of significant changes in natural images is extremely difficult when brief blank fields are placed between alternating displays of an original and a modified scene. On the other hand, research on the visual mismatch negativity component of the event-related potentials identified sensitivity to events different from the regularity of stimulus sequences, even if the deviant and standard events are non-attended. The present study sought to investigate the apparent controversy between the experience under the (...) change blindness paradigm and the ERP results. To this end, the stimulus of Rensink, O’Reagen, and Clark was adapted to a passive oddball ERP paradigm to investigate the underlying processing differences between the standard and deviant stimuli measured in 22 subjects. Posterior negativity within the 280–330 ms latency range emerged as the difference between ERPs elicited by standard and deviant stimuli, identified as visual mismatch negativity. These results raise the possibility that change blindness is not based on the lack of detailed visual representations or the deficiency of comparing two representations. However, effective discrimination of the two scene versions requires considerable frequency differences between them. (shrink)