15:00 - 16:30
Submission 152
Investigating the Integration of Artificial Filter Information in Face Representations: Using the Face Adaptation Paradigm
Posterwall-56
Presented by: Marie Buerling
Marie Buerling 1, 3, Nils Kloeckner 1, 2, 3, Ronja Mueller 1, 3, 4, Tilo Strobach 1, 3
1 Department of Psychology, Medical School Hamburg, Germany
2 Bamberg Graduate School of Affective and Cognitive Sciences (BaGrACS), University of Bamberg, Germany
3 ICAN Institute for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, MSH Medical School Hamburg, Germany
4 IFPM Institute for Forensic Psychology and Forensic Medicine, MSH Medical School Hamburg, Germany
To recognize familiar faces despite their continuous changes, such as those caused by aging or varying lighting conditions, the human face memory must remain flexible. This flexibility is achieved through the continuous updating of existing memory representations of faces. On social media platforms, online users consume facial changes through artificial filters that smooth the skin, homogenize faces, or enhance contours and details. Our research investigates whether such artificial filter information, e.g., blurring and sharpening filters, can be integrated into mental face representations, thereby updating and becoming part of the face memory. The findings are based on two experimental studies conducted and interpreted within the framework of the face adaptation paradigm. In the first study, viewing strongly blurred faces led to subsequent perceptual distortions: participants judged slightly blurred versions significantly more often as “unchanged” or “natural” compared to a control group, indicating an updating and integration of this information into the existing face representation. A second study examines the temporal stability of such changes over a five-minute interval to determine whether artificial filter information can induce not only short-term perceptual but also long-term and representational changes in face memory. Preliminary analyses show that the change in facial perception caused by artificial filters does not last five minutes, suggesting that such effects are rather short-lived updates of face memory representations.