Individual Faces Were Not Discarded During Extracting Mean Emotion Representations

Individuals can perceive the mean emotion or mean identity of a group of faces. It has been considered that individual representations are discarded when extracting a mean representation; for example, the “element-independent assumption” asserts that the extraction of a mean representation does not depend on recognizing or remembering individual items. The “element-dependent assumption” proposes that the extraction of a mean representation is closely connected to the processing of individual items. The processing mechanism of mean representations and individual representations remains unclear. The present study used a classic member-identification paradigm and manipulated the exposure time and set size to investigate the effect of attentional resources allocated to individual faces on the processing of both the mean emotion representation and individual representations in a set and the relationship between the two types of representations. The results showed that while the precision of individual representations was affected by attentional resources, the precision of the mean emotion representation did not change with it. Our results indicate that two different pathways may exist for extracting a mean emotion representation and individual representations and that the extraction of a mean emotion representation may have higher priority. Moreover, we found that individual faces in a group could be processed to a certain extent even under extremely short exposure time and that the precision of individual representations was relatively poor but individual representations were not discarded.