Faces and bodies in whole person perception

Abstract

Abstract In the current study, we employed a composite paradigm to test whether participants can selectively attend to the face or body information. For this task, participants are shown two sequentially composite face-body stimuli and are cued to attend to the face while ignoring body (Experiment 1) or cued to attend to the body while ignoring face (Experiment 2). In both experiments, we found a congruency effect where participants’ “same/different” discriminations of the cued, to-be-attended face (or body) target stimulus were influenced by the to-be-ignored uncued body (or face) stimulus. The magnitude of the congruency increased with the discrimination difficulty; suggesting as discrimination becomes more difficult, task-irrelevant information exerts a stronger bias on perceptual judgments. Critically, the spatial alignment manipulations between the face and body did not affect the congruency effect indicating that the whole person effect arises at the decisional stage of processing rather than the perceptual holistic stage. Together, our results indicate that person perception is a “whole person” process that obligatorily incorporates face and body information.