Temporal characteristics of perception of facial expressions influence of stimulus-duration changes on categorical perception

摘要

Emotional attributes of facial expressions are perceived very rapidly. In order to demonstrate that such rapid percetion is not categorical, we studied the temporal characteristics of categorical perception (CP) of facial expressions. We examined the influence of stimulus-duration changes upon participants' performance in identification and discrimination tasks. The results showed that CP declined or even disappeared when facial stimuli were presented so briefly as for 50-75 miliseconds. This indicates that CP is not relevant to rapidly occurring affective appraisal, and that emotional information encoded in facial expressions is not categorical.