The Role Of Emotional Outliers Of The Same Valence In The Processing Of Average Emotion In Multiple Face

People can extract the average emotion from multiple faces using ensemble coding,a process also known as summary statistical representation.A summary statistical representation is used to describe trends in the overall set,divided into two main components:concentration trends and variability.Creating a summary statistical representation helps people to quickly and accurately extract important details from complex information,which also plays an important role in areas such as visual attention and working memory.Outliers,as a particular form of variability,can influence judgments of average emotion overall.For example,previous research has found that when outliers are present in the set,it takes longer to process the whole.In addition,outliers can be ignored in average emotion processing.However,previous studies have tended to simply define emotional outliers as emotional faces that are opposite in emotion to the other faces in the set,and have seldom clearly defined what differences between faces and the set are reached in order to be perceived as outliers.The present study focuses on the same-valence emotional outlier and explores their role in the average emotional processing of multiple faces and their changes over time.This study consisted of three experiments.Experiment 1 focused on examining whether faces with the same emotional potency but at a certain unit distance from the set mean would still be perceived as outliers through a psychophysical approach.Building on Experiment 1,Experiment 2 uses a mean emotion judgement task to explore whether emotional outliers of the same valence are excluded or ignored in mean emotion processing.The effect of the samevalence emotional outlier on average emotion processing was further investigated in Experiment 3 to see if it changed over time.The results of the experiment revealed that the same-valence emotional outlier could be perceived as outliers when they differed from the overall average emotion by a large number of units.In addition,the same-valence emotional outlier were not excluded or ignored,but were included in the overall average emotion judgement,and the weight of the outliers may have tended to become smaller over time.The ensemble coding may be a process of slowly reducing noise to reduce the weight of outliers.