Attending to faces and bodies in person perception

Although faces and bodies provide essential cues to one's identity, it is not well understood how the observer encodes and processes the two sources of information in person perception. Compelling questions remain regarding the extent to which the body influences the perception of the face and conversely, the extent to which the face influences the perception of the body. To address these questions, we constructed pairs of face-body composites where face and body information was either congruent (i.e., "same" faces/"same" bodies or "different" faces/"different" bodies) or incongruent (i.e., "same" faces/"different" bodies or "different" faces/"same" bodies). The composite pairs were presented in a sequential matching paradigm where the participant's task was to judge whether the to-be-attended faces (Experiment 1) or the to-be-attended bodies (Experiment 2) were identical (e.g., "same" response) or non-identical (e.g., "different" response). The key finding was that in both experiments, participants performed better on the congruent trials than the incongruent trials, indicating that the unattended body (Experiment 1) or unattended face (Experiment 2) interfered with "same/different" judgements. Critically, alignment had no effect on face-body congruency, suggesting that the face and body information are combined at the later decisional integration stage of processing than at the early integration perceptual stage. Together, our results indicate that information about faces and bodies is automatically combined in person perception where it is difficult to separate judgements about a person's face independent of the body and vice versa. The raw trial-level data for each subject, analysis code, and materials for all experiments are available at https://osf.io/ajr4d/files/osfstorage?view_only =. The link for the preregistered Experiments 1 and 2 can be found at https://osf.io/k3gsh and the preregistered control experiment at https://osf.io/jmcnu .