Examining the role of red background in magnocellular contribution to face perception

Centre for Cognition and Decision Making, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia
Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW, Australia
Department of Physical Therapy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.1295v1
Subject Areas
Neuroscience, Cognitive Disorders, Psychiatry and Psychology
Keywords
face perception, magnocellular pathway, spatial frequency, reach trajectories
Copyright
© 2015 Awasthi et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Awasthi B, Williams MA, Friedman J. 2015. Examining the role of red background in magnocellular contribution to face perception. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1295v1

Abstract

This study examines the role of the magnocellular system in the early stages of face perception, in particular sex categorization. Utilizing the specific property of magnocellular suppression in red light, we investigated visually guided reaching to low and high spatial frequency hybrid faces against red and grey backgrounds. The arm movement curvature measure shows that reduced response of the magnocellular pathway interferes with the low spatial frequency component of face perception. This is the first definitive behavioral evidence for magnocellular contribution to face perception.

Author Comment

This is a preprint submission to PeerJ.