The face viewpoint aftereffect: Adapting to full faces, head outlines, and features

There is strong evidence that higher visual areas in the brain encode face viewpoint. The current study aims to shed light on the nature of this representation. Using a psychophysical adaptation paradigm based on Fang and He (2005), we compared the effects of adapting to full faces, head outline only, and internal features only, while testing with full faces in each case (12 subjects). We found reliable viewpoint aftereffects in all three conditions. The combined magnitude of the aftereffects from the two partial conditions was less than the aftereffect from full faces, suggesting a nonlinear combination of internal features and head outline. In a second experiment, we found that changing the direction of eye gaze did not modulate the viewpoint aftereffect.

► Face viewpoint aftereffects were generated in three different conditions: full faces, head outline, internal features.
► Adapting to full faces generated the strongest viewpoint aftereffects.
► Changing the direction of eye gaze did not modulate the viewpoint aftereffect.