EXPRESS: Amplified Inversion Effects for Moving Biological Stimuli Remain Largest for Faces and Bodies

Turning an object upside-down disrupts our ability to perceive it accurately, and this inversion effect is disproportionately larger for faces and whole bodies than most other objects. This disproportionate inversion effect is taken as an indicator of holistic processing for these stimuli. Large inversion effects are also found when viewing motion-only information from faces and bodies however these have not been compared to other moving objects in an identity task so it is unclear whether inversion effects remain disproportionately larger for faces and bodies when they are engaged in motion. The current study investigated the effect of inversion on static and moving unfamiliar faces, human bodies and German Shepherd dogs in an old-new recognition memory task. Sensitivity and baseline corrected RT results revealed that inversion effects for faces and whole-bodies remained disproportionately larger than those for German Shepherd dogs, regardless of presentation type, suggesting that both static and moving faces and bodies are processed holistically.

Aesthetic Stimuli Attract Visual Spatial Attention

We investigated the relationship between attention and the aesthetic appearance of visual stimuli. In a first study, we evaluated the aesthetic value of pictures depicting chairs by means of a questionnaire. These pictures were categorized as aesthetic, neutral, or non-aesthetic and used in a second study, in which we employed a dot-probe task and a recognition memory task. In the dot-probe task, two pictures of chairs were presented to the left and to the right of fixation, followed by a dot at one of the chair pictures’ positions. Participants decided at which side the dot had been presented. To investigate the relation between the aesthetic value of the chairs and the orientation of attention, we paired either aesthetic or non-aesthetic pictures with neutral pictures. The results showed that participants reacted faster when the dot appeared at the position of the aesthetic chair than when it appeared at the position of the neutral one. Such a ‘congruency’ effect was absent for non-aesthetic chairs. This interactive pattern of results shows that aesthetic stimuli capture attention. In the recognition memory task, in which participants were asked to decide whether a chair had been presented before or not, aesthetic chairs were more accurately and faster recognized than neutral or non-aesthetic ones. Taken together, these results show that aesthetic stimuli entail prioritized cognitive processing. In a final study, we investigated which particular features of the aesthetic stimuli might be important for this effect by correlating the aesthetic evaluation of the pictures with their Gestalt impression.