Adaptation aftereffects to adiposity across bodies and faces

Ambroziak, K.B. and Field, Sophie and Longo, Matthew and Azañón, Elena (2025) Adaptation aftereffects to adiposity across bodies and faces. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance , ISSN 0096-1523. (In Press)

Abstract

Recent research has highlighted the importance of information about adiposity in the visual perception of both bodies and faces. Behavioural and neuroimaging studies have demonstrated the existence of category-selective visual representations of faces and bodies, as well as integrated whole-person representations. It remains unknown whether visual perception of adiposity arises from category-selective or whole-person mechanisms. Here, we show that whole-person representations are involved by showing cross-category transfer of adaptation aftereffects to adiposity between faces and bodies. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that adaptation to a gaunt face biases judgements of subsequently presented faces, complementing previous research demonstrating adiposity aftereffects in bodies. We then demonstrate cross-category transfer of such aftereffects from faces to bodies (Experiments 2-3) and from bodies to faces (Experiment 4). Cross-category transfer, however, was substantially weaker than within-category transfer and was not consistently observed across all individual conditions. A control study (Experiment 5) showed no adaptation when adapting face stimuli were inverted, suggesting that the effects are unlikely to result from non-specific low-level features of the stimuli. These results demonstrate functional interactions between visual representations of faces and bodies in the perception of adiposity, suggesting the involvement of integrated whole-person representations.

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