ERP Study On The Perceptual Processing Of Cartoon Faces And Real Face Expressions In Children And Adults

In daily life,children are more attracted to cartoon animation than adults.Animation creates a vivid and virtual world and expands the space of human imagination.The cartoon images are usually expressed by artistic expression methods with a recreational purpose such as exaggeration,metaphor,sarcasm,and praising,which are also sought after by adults.As a kind of highly-dissimilated face,cartoon face plays a core role in the creation process of a cartoon image.Like the real faces,the cartoon faces also stand for a nonverbal stimulation,including personality characteristics such as gender,age,and expressions,and at the same time,cartoon faces also contain special artistic means of expression except for the same structure of the real faces.The processing of cartoon faces,including perceptual processing,classification,learning recognition,and attractiveness of cartoon and real faces,will all profoundly affect the social interaction and cognitive development of both children and adults.Emotion serves as an important element affecting the identification of cartoon faces and real faces and is able to accelerate the speed of face identification or lengthen the time to process faces.Therefore,under the influence of emotional stimuli induced by different expression valences,the study of the neural activity of cartoon faces and real faces is an unavoidable problem,and it is also a problem with unclear influence mechanisms and unstable results.Humans have special preferences for faces since birth.For children,they may have the ability to encode face structures early,but it is a worth pondering problem to find out when this ability appears and why can’t it be as mature and stable as adult coding.In this research,the event-related potential,(ERP)technology has been employed and two experiments have been conducted to verify whether a difference exists in the perceptual processing of children and adults in response to cartoon and real faces with different expressions.The study selects 26 children aged 5-6 and 36 college students aged 18-25,uses face types(cartoon faces,real faces)and expression types(positive happiness,negative sadness)as independent variables to investigate the impact of these factors on recognizing the influence of latency and amplitude and time-frequency(FFT,ERD)traceability of behavioral indicators(RT,ACC),ERP components(such as N170,VPP,LPP,etc.)of cartoon and real face expression processing.In the previous literatures,Children tend to obtain more processing resources when encoding the negative cartoon emotional stimulation,which indicates children are more obsessed with cartoons,and children have shown a higher accuracy in dealing with the real faces,which proves that the real face is capable of promoting children’s ability in facial expression recognition.The second experiment examined the ERP study on the perception processing of cartoon and real faces for adults.Behavioral results show that only for the cartoon face type,negative sadness is shorter than positive happy response.There is no difference in the reaction time on real faces.This shows that in the early processing stage,adults have automated processing of real faces.This may be related to the experience of adults.Timefrequency results show that the ERD amplitude is more negative and the energy value decreases in the alpha band from-500 ms to 1000 ms in adults.This shows that adults automatically process task stimuli in this frequency band.The conjoint analysis based on the results from experiment 1 and 2 has come to the conclusion that :(1)There is a difference in the perception and processing of cartoon and real faces between children and adults.The difference in neural activity between children and adults with different expressions and two faces manifests in the middle and late stages of N2 and LPP in the course of time.The brain area is mainly distributed in the central area and the parietal area.(2)Cartoon faces are attractive to children.In both time and frequency domain analysis,cartoon faces have been found to cause higher volatility in children.The adult group has the advantage of speed processing of real faces,which may be due to the influence of experience,and the adults automatically process real faces.(3)The real face can promote children’s facial expression recognition to a certain extent,possesses potential benefits in the expression of other types of face,and has certain significance for children’s expression,communication,and emotional experience in realistic scenes.