Probing dynamic human facial action recognition from the other side of the mean

Cristóbal Curio, Martin A. Giese, Martin Breidt, Mario Kleiner, Heinrich H. Bülthoff

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Insights from human perception of moving faces have the potential to provide interesting insights for technical animation systems as well as in the neural encoding of facial expressions in the brain. We present a psychophysical experiment that explores high-level aftereffects for dynamic facial expressions. We address specifically in how far such after-effects represent adaptation in neural representation for static vs. dynamic features of faces. High-level after-effects have been reported for the recognition of static faces [Webster and Maclin 1999; Leopold et al. 2001], and also for the perception of point-light walkers [Jordan et al. 2006; Troje et al. 2006]. Aftereffects were reflected by shifts in category boundaries between different facial expressions and between male and female walks. We report on a new after-effect in humans observing dynamic facial expressions that have been generated by a highly controllable dynamicmorphable face model. As key element of our experiment, we created dynamic 'anti-expressions' in analogy to static 'antifaces' [Leopold et al. 2001]. We tested the influence of dynamics and identity on expression-specific recognition performance after adaptation to 'anti-expressions'. In addition, by a quantitative analysis of the optic flow patterns corresponding to the adaptation and test expressions we rule out that the observed changes reflect a simple low-level motion after-effect. Since we found no evidence for a critical role of temporal order of the stimulus frames we conclude that after-effects in dynamic faces might be dominated by adaptation to the form information in individual stimulus frames.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAPGV 2008 - Proceedings of the Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages59-66
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)9781595939814
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2008
EventSymposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization, APGV 2008 - Los Angeles, CA, United States
Duration: 2008 Aug 92008 Aug 10

Publication series

NameAPGV 2008 - Proceedings of the Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization

Conference

ConferenceSymposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization, APGV 2008
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLos Angeles, CA
Period08/8/908/8/10

Keywords

  • Facial animation
  • Facial motion
  • Human psychophysics

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

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