Categorizing ambiguous facial expressions

Morphing between face images that are expressing different emotions results in stimuli ambiguous terms of category membership. Within a categorical perception framework, the status these is questionable: they should either be uncategorizable as one parent or their ambiguity may mean categorized emotion other with low confidence. However, also unique signal emotional states distinct from based on. In present study, we examined this possibility by allowing participants to categorize facial morphs free response task. Our hypothesis was labels assigned faces setting multimodal and unambiguous images. To test hypothesis, presented 74 made blending together pairs expressions 71 We analyzed participants’ responses using natural language processing methods: for each image were converted into WordNet synset representations on large-scale corpus compared pairwise semantic dissimilarity metric. Pairwise dissimilarities words same projected three-dimensional space so clustering could applied labels. This revealed significantly more clusters obtained approximately twice many used morphs. Therefore, morphed categories represented parents perceived variably, but nonetheless yield clear modes unconstrained responses. need broader view basic reconsideration role research.