Holistic face processing drives impressions of humor in gender-incongruent composite faces: Evidence from experiments with Aligned, Misaligned and Inverted displays

Humor often arises from violations of expectation. During face perception, observers form strong predictions about the structure of faces — and in particular that different facial features in the same face should match one another. As a result, faces which deviate from this prediction — e.g. ‘composite faces’, composed of top and bottom halves of different identities — sometimes look funny. Here we hypothesize that the visual system forms the holistic prediction that different features in the same face will all belong to a coherent gender category. In an Aligned experiment, in which the composites’ top and bottom halves are vertically aligned, we will test whether Different Gender composites (top half differs in gender from bottom) look funnier than Same Gender composites (top half matches gender of bottom). In two control experiments, we will then test whether this bias to see gender mismatches as funnier is particularly driven by violations of a holistic face schema, by comparing this effect to the same effect under conditions where holistic processing of the face is disrupted: we predict that the bias to see a Different Gender composite as funnier than a Same Gender composite will be attenuated in a Misaligned experiment, which disrupts configural integration between the top and bottom halves by horizontally displacing them relative to one another and in an Inverted experiment, in which aligned Same and Different Gender composites will be presented upside down (inversion is also known to reduce holistic processing of facial features).