| Abstract: | Two experiments with 17 undergraduate students examined the respective role of the cerebral hemispheres in face perception and the nature of their contribution depending on task demands and on the spatial-frequency composition of the stimuli. 16 faces of members of the Ss' department were presented as stimuli, with men, women, and professors, and nonprofessors, being equally represented. In Exp I, high-resolution black-and-white photographs of faces were used in 3 reaction-time (RT) tasks: verbal identification, manual membership categorization, and manual male/female categorization, in a within-S design. Identification and membership categorization were significantly better performed in right-visual-field presentations, whereas the male/female categorization yielded a nonsignificant left-visual-field superiority. In Exp II, 2 versions of the same faces were used: digitized low-pass (0–2 cycles/degree of visual angle) and digitized broad-pass (0–32 cycle/degree) faces. Broad–pass faces produced the same laterality pattern as in Exp I, while low-pass faces were better processed in left-visual-field presentations for all 3 tasks. Results suggest that the 2 hemispheres play a role in face perception and that their contribution may vary as a function of the task demands and of spatial-frequency components of the incoming information. (54 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
