Visual adaptation
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Visual adaptation is the temporary change in sensitivity or perception when exposed to a new or intense stimulus, and the lingering afterimage that may result when the stimulus is removed. These continuous small adjustments reflect the neural coding process of the visual system, and exist so the brain can attempt to "normalize" the visual experience.
Visual adaptation is the temporary change in sensitivity or perception when exposed to a new or intense stimulus, and the lingering afterimage that may result when the stimulus is removed. These continuous small adjustments reflect the neural coding process of the visual system, and exist so the brain can attempt to "normalize" the visual experience.
Face recognition
Perceptual adaptation plays a big role in identifying faces. In an experiment conducted by Gillian Rhodes, the effect of face adaptation was investigated, along with whether visual adaptation affects the recognition of faces. The experiment found that perceptual adaptation does, in fact, affect face recognition. Individuals tend to adapt to common facial features as early as after five minutes of looking at them. This suggests that humans adapt to common facial features, leaving neural resources and space to identify uncommon characteristics and features, which is how humans identify specific faces on a case-by-case basis. Perceptual aftereffects for face recognition occur for several different stimuli, including gender, ethnicity, identity, emotion, and attractiveness of a face. The fact that this distinction occurs, implies that face recognition is a process that happens on a higher level and later on in the visual encoding, rather than early on within visual adaptation. The fact that the aftereffects in face recognition in particular are so strong, suggests that it is for the purpose of regulation of how processes work. This provides a sense of constancy in an individual's perception, while adapting to differences and possible versions of a stimulus allows for constancy and stability, and makes it easier to adapt to variations in a stimulus, while recognizing commonalities. These face perception cues are encoded in an individual's brain for extended periods of time, ensuring consistency over the individual's lifespan. A young person would perceive stimuli the same way as an older individual.
Further reading
Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1374869939 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.