Analytical Essay on Adaptation Effects

In daily life, human beings meet different people every day so there is a need for individuals to identify and make a judgment of the people they encountered to interact with them. Much research suggested that faces are a major source of information about individuals and function as crucial communication cues for people to interact with others (Rhodes et al., 2015; Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, & Hall, 2005). Faces also play a crucial role in shaping the way people perceive others (Little, Debruine, & Jones, 2005; Perrett et al., 2002; Rhodes, Jeffery, Watson, Clifford, & Nakayama, 2003; Webster, Kaping, Mizokami, & Duhamel, 2004).

Faces provide two different types of information which help the perceptions and judgments of people. The first type of information is stable across changes in appearance, which is the identity of a person. Faces provide cues for judgments of stable characteristics and thus identification of a person even though their expression changes or seeing them from different viewpoints. Webster and colleagues (2004) indicated that face perception is a fundamental process for determining the features of others, such as age, gender, and ethnicity. Thus, faces serve as a crucial cue for people to identify different people and interact with them. The second type of information provides cues for judgments of characteristics that vary over time, such as emotion and facial expression. People can make inferences about others’ traits and underlying characteristics from their facial features and emotion shown (Olivola & Todorov, 2010; Todorov et al., 2005; Webster et al., 2004).

Many studies have suggested that people draw trait inferences from the facial appearance of others quickly and spontaneously (Bar, Neta, & Linz, 2006; Rhodes et al., 2015; Todorov, Pakrashi, & Oosterhof, 2009). For example, Bar and colleagues (2006) suggested that trait inferences could be drawn rapidly within the first 39 milliseconds based on the available information shown on the faces. Also, Todorov and colleagues (2009) demonstrated that 33 milliseconds of exposure to faces is enough for people to draw a specific trait inference and make a snap judgment from a stranger’s face. Thus, it is believed that people can extract important facial features effectively and draw inferences from an unknown face within a short period of time. However, it is suggested that the automatically formed inferences leave little room for conscious judgmental processes to occur or change the already made inferences (Kahneman, 2003). According to Willis and Todorov (2006), there was a large correlation between the trait judgments made after 100 milliseconds of exposures of faces and those made when time constraints were absent. Therefore, people hardly change their impressions towards others once they are formed.

The attributions made by people from facial features may not always be correct (Olivola & Todorov, 2010; Rhodes et al., 2015), yet, they still influence people's judgments and decisions. Todorov and colleagues (2005) suggested that people may go beyond the inferences provided by the facial features of a person and make a direct judgment of the characteristics of that person even though it may not be true. Some researchers have suggested that people tend to associate traits with underlying characteristics. For example, competence is related to the possession of skills and capabilities that enable one’s own goals to be achieved (Castelli, Carraro, Ghitti, & Pastore, 2009) while baby facades are perceived as kind and warm (McArthur & Apatow, 1984). Besides, inferences of trustworthiness could be derived from judging whether the expressions of faces are happy or angry (Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008). Happy faces are generally perceived to be more trustworthy while angry faces are normally perceived as untrustworthy. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that these inferences made may not always be accurate (Olivola & Todorov, 2010; Rhodes et al., 2015). Olivola and Todorov (2010) proposed that the inferences formed from the emotional cues on a face may not be able to generalize properly to the personality dispositions of that person.

With regard to the spontaneous essence of the inferences made from the facial appearances, the inferences have a compelling influence on the social judgments and decisions that individuals make in daily life situations, such as hiring decisions (Langlois, et al., 2000), voting in political elections (Martin, 1978; Miller, Wattenberg, & Malanchuck, 1986) and finding romantic partners (Olivola et al., 2009). Martin (1978) suggested that the results of polling could be predicted from the competence judgments of the candidates. Miller and colleagues (1986) also proposed that competence is seen as a crucial characteristic of a political candidate. Moreover, it is found that people with a competent face have a higher chance to be elected in a poll than people who are baby-faced since the former are perceived to be more capable (Castelli et al., 2009; Olivola & Todorov, 2010; Todorov et al., 2005). For finding partners, Olivola and colleagues (2009) argued that the trait inferences drawn from the facial appearances of others exert influences on the choices of speed-dating participants. It was found that male users of an online dating site who seemed to be extraverted and open to new experiences were more likely to date successfully. As a result, even the inferences drawn are single-glance judgments since they can be made within a brief period of exposure, their impacts on the decisions of people in daily life are crucial and influential.

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Although facial features may help people make quick judgments of others and the impacts are compelling, other mechanisms may influence the process of perceptions and judgments. One possible mechanism is that human visual perception is greatly influenced by visual adaptation. In fact, the appearance-based inferences drawn can be influenced strongly by the features of the faces encountered before because of the adaptation effect (Leopold, O’Toole, Vetter, & Blanz, 2001; Leopold, Rhodes, Müller, & Jeffery, 2005; Little et al., 2005; Webster & MacLeod, 2011). An adaptation effect occurs when individuals are first adapted to a face of a particular identity and then asked to judge another face of that characteristic; the new face will be seen as occurring in the opposite direction to the initial, adaptor face (Leopold, et al., 2001; Little et al., 2005; Loffler, Yourganov, Wilkinson, & Wilson, 2005). Thus, it is suggested that adaptation provides a method of testing perceptual processing, that is to study how people make perceptual judgments of others.

Adaptation effects have been found in the perceptions of different information about faces. For example, the perceptions of age (Schweinberger et al., 2010), gender (Bestelmeyer et al., 2008; Kovács, Zimmer, Harza, & Vidnyánszky, 2007; Webster et al., 2004), ethnicity (Jaquet, Rhodes, & Hayward, 2008; Ng, Boynton, & Fine, 2008; Rhodes, Watson, Jeffery, & Clifford, 2010), identity (Leopold et al., 2001; Jiang, Blanz, & O’Toole, 2006), eye spacing and gazing (Jenkins, Beaver, & Calder, 2006), and facial expression and emotion (Adams, Gray, Gerner, & Graf, 2010; Leopold et al., 2005; Little et al., 2005; Ng et al., 2008; Webster et al., 2004). Schweinberger and colleagues (2010) conducted a study that investigated the adaptation effects on age, the results indicated that adapting to a young or old face would make the test face appear older or younger respectively. In the research conducted by Webster and his colleagues (2004), the results showed that adapting to a male face makes an androgynous face (i.e., having both male and female features) appear more female-like while adapting to a female face makes an androgynous face appear more male-like. The findings of Rhodes and others (2010) showed that the adaptation effect could be found in judgments of ethnicity, suggesting that the thresholds for identifying the ethnicity of the faces that were adapted and unadapted were reduced by adapting to an average Asian or Caucasian face. Furthermore, in the study conducted by Leopold and others (2001) using a neutral face, which is generated by averaging a sample of faces, and an anti-face, which is a face having the appearance of a completely dissimilar human being, with negative values of identity strength of the original face, the results indicated that adaptation to an anti-face made the perception more biased toward the original face. These results thus suggested that adaptation to a previously seen face influences the judgment that people make when encountering a new face.

Additionally, it is suggested that the size of the adaptation effect depends on the perceptual dissimilarity between adaptors and test faces (Leopold et al., 2001). The larger the difference between the adaptors and the test faces, the more pronounced the adaption effect will be. Furthermore, the sustainability and vigorousness of adaptation effects are affected by the delay, which is the time period between an adaptation phase and a test phase (Strobach & Carbon, 2013). The differences in the period of delay can be large, delays can range from milliseconds (Leopold et al., 2001) to minutes (Kloth & Schweinberger, 2008), and some may even extend to days and weeks in specific laboratory research (Carbon & Ditye, 2011). According to Carbon and Ditye (2011), the study of the effects of delay in adaptation allows the experimenters to understand more about the delay features of adaptation effects. It also presents practical data concerning the decay of adaptation effects and hence the capabilities of the visual system in recalibration and readaptation. Other than the delay in adaptation, the time period during the adaptation phase, or adaptation duration, which represents the duration of time during which the adaptor is presented, also influences the degree of adaptation effects (Strobach, Ditye, & Carbon, 2011). The adaptation duration can moderate the robustness of the adaptation effects. It is suggested that a very brief exposure of 5 seconds to an adaptor is already enough to produce an adaptation effect (Leopold et al., 2001). Although a short period of time of exposure to the adaptor can cause the adaptation effect, it is suggested that a longer adaptation time would result in a slower decay of the effect, thus, a longer sustainability of the adaptation effect (Leopold et al., 2005; Strobach et al., 2011; Strobach & Carbon, 2013).

Other than studying the effects of delay and duration on adaptation effects, it is also important to study the transfer of adaptation effects. The study of adaptation transfer effects allows researchers to make deductions about the property of visual perception that is associated with particularly adapted stimuli (Strobach & Carbon, 2013). By studying adaptation transfer effects, inferences concerning the plasticity of the neuron coding system during visual processing may be drawn (Webster, 2011; Webster & MacLeod, 2011). It is proposed that the investigation of adaptation transfer effects can be done on gender, identity, and ethnicity (Strobach & Carbon, 2013).

More important, it is suggested that the adaptation effects of face, or face aftereffects (Leopold et al., 2001; Little et al., 2005; Webster et al., 2004), reflect changes in the feedbacks of neurons that are responsible for coding faces (Loffler et al., 2005; Winston et al., 2004). Face aftereffect cannot be illustrated by retinal adaptation, which is a low-level coding mechanism (Rhodes et al., 2015), since retinal adaptation is insensitive to the changes in the retinal location and the size of the stimuli between the adaptation stages and the test stages (Leopold et al., 2001, 2005; Rhodes et al., 2003). On the other hand, face aftereffect is sensitive to the variations in the retinal location and the size of the stimuli before and after adaptation (Leopold et al., 2001; Webster & MacLeod, 2011). Therefore, it is indicated that face aftereffect is a high-level perceptual judgment and reflects face-specific representation.

Adaptation effects are found for natural variations in faces and natural categorical judgments about faces (Webster et al., 2004; Webster & MacLeod, 2011). According to Webster and MacLeod (2011), the adaptation effect is essential for revealing the way that human perceptions of faces are influenced by the facial features that individuals encounter in their daily lives. Since adaptation to a previous face biases the perception of a new face by making the latter one perceived as less similar to the former one, it is believed that the adaptation effect may influence normal perceptions of faces and hence social judgments. To be specific, the social judgments of one’s characteristics such as expressions and attractiveness are determined by the faces that each encountered before (Webster & MacLeod, 2011). Consequently, face perceptions and thereby social judgments are profoundly influenced by the viewing context so that the same face can be interpreted differently depending on the previous face an individual has been exposed to.