Jocelyn S. Zhang¹, Joan Danielle K. Ongchoco¹; ¹The University of British Columbia

Emotions have the capacity to make people feel ‘not quite like themselves’. This common expression implies a shift in identity—not in terms of mere facial identity, but a deeper sort, involving a sense of who a person is over time. Questions on identity are long-standing philosophical puzzles that have been difficult to explore empirically. Here, by leveraging a paradigm in visual perception, we ask how perceived emotional transitions (e.g., seeing a neutral face become sad) might interact with identity persistence (i.e., how we represent an individual as persisting over time). We adapted a classic object persistence paradigm, the tunnel effect, in which an object that passes behind an occluder is perceived as the same object, despite changes to superficial features (e.g., shape, color). Observers saw faces pass behind an occluder. These faces were imposed with a target letter, and observers simply reported whether the letter stayed the same or different across the occluder. Critically, we varied the face’s emotions, where sometimes the face maintained its emotion through the occluder (e.g., starting sad and staying sad), or not (e.g., starting neutral and becoming sad). When emotions were maintained across the occluder, response times were facilitated in the same-target condition than in the different-target condition—replicating the basic tunnel effect. This effect, however, disappeared when the face changed emotions across the occluder—despite the face maintaining its superficial identity, with a reliable interaction across conditions. This disruption in identity persistence mimicked the same pattern of results when the actual identity switched (e.g., when a different person’s face emerged from the occluder), while emotion remained constant. These findings first demonstrate that a ‘deeper’ sense of identity is spontaneously tracked in visual processing—and that this may be more contingent on perceived changes in emotion than we might have previously thought.