Visual Search for Emotional Facial Expression: Effect of Space Density on Visual Crowd Effect

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.210617.095How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Emotional facial expression, Space density, Visual crowd effect, Visual search

Abstract

Visual search studies have found that positive facial expressions are more efficiently detected among a crowd of distractor faces than other expressions, known as the happy superiority effect (HSE). Moreover, the density of peripheral items in clutter can also impact our process of visual search. The present study investigated the HSE among different space densities in a visual crowding task. In the experiment, the stimuli consist of 12 facial images, and a 2 (target emotion: positive vs. negative) × 3 (space density: null vs. low vs. high) × 3 (flanker emotion: neutral vs. positive vs. negative) within subject design was conducted. Participants were instructed to determine whether the target face in the centre was positive or negative. Results showed that space density had a significant effect. Generally, the greater the space density was, the slower the recognition speed was, reflecting that crowding conditions needed more attentional resources, leading to more mistakes in recognition processing. And the HSE in light crowding conditions was the most robust, but not in heavy conditions. There was a gradual change from a weak HSE to a strong HSE as the space density became smaller. In conclusion, our findings contributed to the study of visual search and emotion recognition, creatively making introduction of space density, which filled the emptiness of previous studies and reducing the limitation of schematic faces in real-life situation, but still needed further investigation.

Copyright

© 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Siqi Huang
AU  - Xinqian Li
AU  - Jiaqin Lu
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/06/20
TI  - Visual Search for Emotional Facial Expression: Effect of Space Density on Visual Crowd Effect
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 2nd International Conference on Mental Health and Humanities Education (ICMHHE 2021）
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 351
EP  - 358
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210617.095
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.210617.095
ID  - Huang2021
ER  -