Impact Of Semantic Saturation On Facial Emotion Recognition

In our daily life,there is an interesting phenomenon: Sometimes when we are looking at a Chinese character for a long time,we will produce an illusion,as if the word is changing and becoming stranger or even harder to understand the meaning of the expression.This phenomenon also exists in the English word reading,long time watching or loudly reading an English word for a certain number of times will produce some feelings that the word is changing and we seems no longer know it.In addition,this phenomenon—— "semantic saturation",which was also found in some long-time pictures’ watching.Face recognition is a basic course of processing and judging information such as expression of face,gender,age,skin color.It is seen as the first step in sociable communication,which can help us better acquire personal information in the daily life,and it is a kind of congenital formed ability along with human evolution.As an important mean of interpersonal communication,language is an acquired ability and knowledge system which is acquired through learning.This study aims at combining “Semantic Saturation” and face recognition,answering a question that under the circumstances when there is obstruction of accessing to the meaning of language,if face emotional recognition will be affected,and what effect it will be.Two experiments were carried out,experiment 1 and experiment 2,by manipulating semantic saturated emotional word(“cry/smile”)(experiment 1 manipulates the negative and neutral words’ saturation,experiment 2 manipulates the positive and neutral words’ saturation),making the participants to complete the same face expression judgment tasks,testing the mechanism and differences between facial emotion and emotional words with different valences.And through the use of ERP technology to record and analysis related ERP components,so that we can discover what effect will semantic saturated words(“cry/smile”)have on face recognition.The results show that:In experiment 1,the response time and precision rate of semantic saturation conditions are significantly longer and lower than that of the baseline conditions;N170 has a longer latency and higher amplitude of semantic saturation conditions than that of the baseline conditions.In experiment 2,the response time of semantic saturation conditions is significantly longer than that of the baseline conditions;N170 has a longer latency of semantic saturation conditions than that of the baseline conditions.Both in experiment 1 and experiment 2,P1 latency and amplitude are not reach to a significant level and the LPC average amplitude is greater in neutral word condition than that in the saturation words condition.Conclusions:(1)The concept of semantic information in face emotional recognition plays an important role,when the semantic concepts related to emotion information are blocked,face emotion recognition will be affected;(2)Emotional semantic signals have an effect on N170 and LPC components in face emotion recognition;(3)There are differences between neutral word satiation and emotional word satiation,different stages depend on different theoretical assumptions.