1 April 2004
Accustomed to her face?
We perceive and classify human faces — and often the people behind them — based on a range of factors including gender, ethnicity and expression. This process is subject to a form of calibration. Webster et al. show that the way a face looks to an observer depends dramatically on the set of faces the observer has recently been viewing. For instance, after viewing a male face, an ambiguous face can look distinctly female. And different populations have different reference points that can be influenced by exposure to a new culture — such as Japanese who have just arrived in North America contrasted to longer-term residents. The fact that large changes occur after even a brief viewing of images of real faces suggests that this adaptation process plays an important role in everyday face perception.
Adaptation to natural facial categories
MICHAEL A. WEBSTER, DANIEL KAPING, YOKO MIZOKAMI &
PAUL DUHAMEL
Nature 428, 557–561 (2004); doi:10.1038/nature02420
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