Critical frequencies in the perception of letters, faces, and novel shapes: Evidence for limited scale invariance for faces
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the common intuition that object recognition processes should be relatively scale invariant, a number of studies show that this is not the case. Using a critical-band masking paradigm, we examined the pattern of scale dependence of diagnostic spatial frequencies across a range of stimuli that varied in participants' prior experience and the 'ecological significance' of the stimuli, by which we mean the degree of universality and recency of the development of the stimulus in human culture, letters being an example of a culturally arbitrary stimulus and faces a universal one. We found scale dependence for letters, mirror-image letters, and novel shapes, consistent with prior results, as well as for inverted faces. However, upright faces showed a relatively scale-invariant pattern especially for face sizes that corresponded to those encountered in typical social interactions. This suggests an important difference between the processing of faces and other objects that may reflect their unique status as stimuli.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".