Temporal integration of bodies and faces: united we stand, divided we fall?

ABSTRACT

Although most research in the field of emotion perception has focused on the isolated face, recent studies have highlighted the integration of emotional faces and bodies. Regardless of instructions to ignore it, incongruent emotional body context can automatically alter the categorization of distinct and prototypical facial expressions. Previous work suggested that face–body integration is rapid, automatic, and persists even after spatial misalignment of the two. However, the temporal dynamics of face–body integration were never explored. Using a novel measure of temporal visual integration, the current report examines the effect of introducing a temporal gap between the body and face. When presented simultaneously, faces and bodies showed robust integration: the face was strongly influenced by the information conveyed by the task-irrelevant body. By contrast, when faces and bodies were presented with even the briefest temporal lag, we failed to find evidence for integration of bodily and facial emotion cues. These main findings were replicated across three experiments, and suggest that the integration between emotional faces and bodies may be more fragile than previously assumed.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual integration
• temporal integration
• social cognition
• facial expressions
• body language
• cognitive control

Acknowledgements

We thank Yaffa Yeshurun for valuable discussions of this work and Maya Bamberger, Klil Baram, Nagham Ghantus, Neta Maimon, and Tamar Almog for their help in running the experiments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Unfortunately, some demographic forms were lost. Based on available information, age is estimated to range between 19 and 30 years.

2 One possibility that cannot be ruled out relates to the differential effect of temporal lags on “lower” and “higher” level perceptual operations. Specifically, temporal lags have been shown to disrupt recognition performance when the task demands “low-level” object recognition (such as basic objects and shapes; Singer & Kreiman, 2014), more than it disrupts “high-level” tasks such as integrating facial parts. In our case the body–face integration may have relied on, or may have involved, more “low-level” processing, and hence perhaps was not resistant enough to the interruption.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Grant 277/12 from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) to Baruch Eitam, by Grant 1140/13 from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) to Hillel Aviezer and by an EU Career Integration Grant to Hillel Aviezer [CIG #618597].