Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Crowds of emotional faces are ubiquitous, so much so that the visual system utilizes a specialized mechanism known as ensemble coding to see them. In addition to being proximally close, members of emotional crowds, such as a laughing audience or an angry mob, often behave together. The manner in which crowd members behave—in sync or out of sync—may be critical for understanding their collective affect. Are ensemble mechanisms sensitive to these dynamic properties of groups? Here, observers estimated the average emotion of a crowd of dynamic faces. The members of some crowds changed their expressions synchronously, whereas individuals in other crowds acted asynchronously. Observers perceived the emotion of a synchronous group more precisely than the emotion of an asynchronous crowd or even a single dynamic face. These results demonstrate that ensemble representation is particularly sensitive to coordinated behavior, and they suggest that shared behavior is critical for understanding emotion in groups.

Keywords

visual perception emotion social perception ensemble coding summary perception open data

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Alvarez

G. A.

(2011). Representing multiple objects as an ensemble enhances visual cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15, 122–131.

Ambadar

Schooler

J. W.

Cohn

J. F.

(2005). Deciphering the enigmatic face: The importance of facial dynamics in interpreting subtle facial expressions. Psychological Science, 16, 403–410.

Ariely

(2001). Seeing sets: Representation by statistical properties. Psychological Science, 12, 157–162.

Awh

Barton

Vogel

E. K.

(2007). Visual working memory represents a fixed number of items regardless of complexity. Psychological Science, 18, 622–628.

Bloom

Veres

(1999). The perceived intentionality of groups. Cognition, 71, B1–B9.

Brainard

D. H.

(1997). The Psychophysics Toolbox. Spatial Vision, 10, 433–436.

Chong

S. C.

Treisman

(2005). Attentional spread in the statistical processing of visual displays. Perception & Psychophysics, 67, 1–13.

Cosmides

Tooby

(2005). Neurocognitive adaptations designed for social exchange. In Buss

D. M.

(Ed.), The handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 584–627). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Farah

M. J.

Wilson

K. D.

Drain

Tanaka

J. N.

(1998). What is “special” about face perception? Psychological Review, 105, 482–498.

10.

Gruenfeld

D. H.

Tiedens

L. Z.

(2010). Organizational preferences and their consequences. In Fiske

S. T.

Gilbert

D. T.

Lindzey

(Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 1252–1287). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

11.

Haberman

Harp

Whitney

(2009). Averaging facial expression over time. Journal of Vision, 9(11), Article 1. doi:10.1167/9.11.1

12.

Haberman

Whitney

(2007). Rapid extraction of mean emotion and gender from sets of faces. Current Biology, 17, R751–R753.

13.

Hubert-Wallander

Boynton

G. M.

(2015). Not all summary statistics are made equal: Evidence from extracting summaries across time. Journal of Vision, 15(4), Article 5. doi:10.1167/15.4.5

14.

G. W. M.

Chiu

C. Y.

Wan

(2006). Birds of a feather and birds flocking together: Physical versus behavioral cues may lead to trait- versus goal-based group perception may. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 368–381.

15.

Lickel

Hamilton

D. L.

Sherman

S. J.

(2001). Elements of a lay theory of groups: Types of groups, relational styles, and the perception of group entitativity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 129–140.

16.

Marchant

A. P.

Simons

D. J.

de Fockert

J. W.

(2013). Ensemble representations: Effects of set size and item heterogeneity on average size perception. Acta Psychologica, 142, 245–250.

17.

Maurer

Le Grand

Mondloch

C. J.

(2002). The many faces of configural processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 255–260.

18.

Milgram

Bickman

Berkowitz

(1969). Note on the drawing power of crowds of different size. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 13, 79–82.

19.

Moscovitch

Winocur

Behrmann

(1997). What is special about face recognition? Nineteen experiments on a person with visual object agnosia and dyslexia but normal face recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 555–604.

20.

Myczek

Simons

D. J.

(2008). Better than average: Alternatives to statistical summary representations for rapid judgments of average size. Perception & Psychophysics, 70, 772–788.

21.

Palmer

S. E.

(1999). Vision science: Photons to phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

22.

Perrett

D. I.

Oram

M. W.

Ashbridge

(1998). Evidence accumulation in cell populations responsive to faces: An account of generalisation of recognition without mental transformations. Cognition, 67, 111–145.

23.

Richler

J. J.

Mack

M. L.

Palmeri

T. J.

Gauthier

(2011). Inverted faces are (eventually) processed holistically. Vision Research, 51, 333–342.

24.

Rolls

E. T.

Tovée

M. J.

Panzeri

(1999). The neurophysiology of backward visual masking: Information analysis. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 11, 300–311.

25.

Ross

Burr

(2008). The knowing visual self. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 363–364.

26.

Sekuler

A. B.

Bennett

P. J.

(2001). Generalized common fate: Grouping by common luminance changes. Psychological Science, 12, 437–444.

27.

Sekuler

A. B.

Gaspar

C. M.

Gold

J. M.

Bennett

P. J.

(2004). Inversion leads to quantitative, not qualitative, changes in face processing. Current Biology, 14, 391–396.

28.

Singer

J. M.

Sheinberg

D. L.

(2006). Holistic processing unites face parts across time. Vision Research, 46, 1838–1847.

29.

Sweeny

T. D.

Haroz

Whitney

(2013). Perceiving group behavior: Sensitive ensemble coding mechanisms for biological motion of human crowds. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 39, 329–337.

30.

Sweeny

T. D.

Suzuki

Grabowecky

Paller

K. A.

(2013). Detecting and categorizing fleeting emotions in faces. Emotion, 13, 76–91.

31.

Sweeny

T. D.

Whitney

(2014). Perceiving crowd attention: Ensemble perception of a crowd’s gaze. Psychological Science, 25, 1903–1913.

32.

Cote

Saavedra

(2005). The contagious leader: Impact of the leader’s mood on the mood of group members, group affective tone, and group processes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90, 295–305.

33.

Tottenham

Tanaka

Leon

A. C.

McCarry

Nurse

Hare

T. A.

. . . Nelson

C. A.

(2009). The NimStim set of facial expressions: Judgments from untrained research participants. Psychiatry Research, 168, 242–249.

34.

Wagemans

Elder

J. H.

Kubovy

Palmer

S. E.

Peterson

M. A.

Singh

von der Heydt

(2012). A century of Gestalt psychology in visual perception: I. Perceptual grouping and figure-ground organization. Psychological Bulletin, 138, 1172–1217.

35.

Walker

Vul

(2013). Hierarchical encoding makes individuals in a group seem more attractive. Psychological Science, 25, 225–230.

36.

Watamaniuk

S. N.

Sekuler

Williams

D. W.

(1989). Direction perception in complex dynamic displays: The integration of direction information. Vision Research, 29, 47–59.

37.

Waytz

Young

(2012). The group-member mind trade-off attributing mind to groups versus group members. Psychological Science, 23, 77–85.

38.

Whitney

Haberman

Sweeny

T. D.

(2014). From textures to crowds: Multiple levels of summary statistical perception. In Werner

J. S.

Chalupa

L. M.

(Eds.), The new visual neurosciences (pp. 695–710). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

39.

Whitney

Levi

D. M.

(2011). Visual crowding: A fundamental limit on conscious perception and object recognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15, 160–168.

40.

Woolhouse

M. H.

Lai

(2014). Traces across the body: Influence of music-dance synchrony on the observation of dance. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, Article 965. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00965

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.59 MB

Ensemble Perception of Dynamic Emotional Groups

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References

Supplementary Material