Dongyu Gong

Dongyu Gong

PhD Student at Yale University

Reverse Correlating Ensemble Perception

Perception and Action Lab, Universityof California, Berkeley2019

  • Background: There hasn’t been enough evidence that people can extract summary statistical information about abstract social traits (e.g., trustworthiness, dominance, submissiveness and the like) because the space of faces features that can draw specific judgments is infinitely large.
  • Employed a data-driven reverse correlation approach to model the ensemble perception of trustworthiness.
  • Programmed experiments, collected and analyzed data with Reverse-Correlation Image-Classification Toolbox in R.
  • Participants viewed face crowds of different average trustworthiness levels, and then did a two-images-forced-choice (2IFC) classification task where they selected one of the two faces (with noise patterns superimposed on the base image) more representative of the average trustworthiness of the face crowd previously shown.
  • The average of all selected noise patterns constitutes the classification image (CI) and then the CIs for different average trustworthiness levels were statistically compared to determine how much they were different from each other.