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The processing of cartoony and photorealistic faces

University of British Columbia

Cartoony faces are everywhere, from texting apps to children’s cartoons. Cartoony faces are also often used in cognitive research contexts, where they are used to stand in as simplified photographic faces for their ease of manipulation and creation. This presents an often unspoken assumption: that a cartoony face is analogous to a photographic face in how it will be responded to, understood, and processed by the brain. Over 8 experiments, my dissertation aims to better understand how cartoony faces are similar to photographic faces, and where they differ. In the first two experiments, I found that there was no evidence that people see themselves in simple cartoony faces, as had been suggested in the past, and also that participants associated their photographs more with themselves than drawings of themselves. In Experiments 3 and 4, I found that, as faces become more cartoonized, they become easier to discriminate expressions on as well, and that such changes to ‘cartoonization’ is also represented by changes in neural processing. In Experiments 5 and 6, I found further evidence that cartoony imagery was easier to process than photographic imagery, as measured by the amount of attention – i.e., eye-gaze – that was necessary to respond to cartoony imagery vs. photorealistic imagery. I also found evidence that entirely cartoony displays were more likely to be viewed as congruent when relating symbols to faces compared to mixed media displays. Finally, in Experiments 7 and 8, I found that novel, unknown expressions could be learned easily on both photographic faces as well as cartoony faces, although there was no habituation to cartoony faces while there was to photographic faces. My research demonstrates that cartoony imagery is easier to process compared to photorealistic imagery, and that the extent of this has never fully been described. My research also demonstrates several examples of how cartoony faces show different patterns of allocated attention and different patterns of elicited ERPs compared to photorealistic images.

Text

2019-08-22

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/71407

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/