Mooney Face Stimuli for Visual Perception Research

Authors

Caspar M. Schwiedrzik, European Neuroscience Institute
Lucia Melloni, Columbia University
Aaron Schurger, Chapman UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-6-2018

Abstract

In 1957, Craig Mooney published a set of human face stimuli to study perceptual closure: the formation of a coherent percept on the basis of minimal visual information. Images of this type, now known as "Mooney faces", are widely used in cognitive psychology and neuroscience because they offer a means of inducing variable perception with constant visuospatial characteristics (they are often not perceived as faces if viewed upside down). Mooney's original set of 40 stimuli has been employed in several studies. However, it is often necessary to use a much larger stimulus set. We created a new set of over 500 Mooney faces and tested them on a cohort of human observers. We present the results of our tests here, and make the stimuli freely available via the internet. Our test results can be used to select subsets of the stimuli that are most suited for a given experimental purpose.

Comments

This article was originally published in PLoS ONE, volume 13, issue 7, in 2018. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0200106

Recommended Citation

Schwiedrzik CM, Melloni L, Schurger A (2018) Mooney face stimuli for visual perception research. PLoS ONE 13(7): e0200106. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200106

Copyright

The authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.