Face inversion disproportionately impairs the perception of vertical but not horizontal relations between features.

Upside-down inversion disrupts the processing of spatial relations between the features of a face, while largely preserving local feature analysis. However, recent studies on face inversion failed to observe a clear dissociation between relational and featural processing. To resolve these discrepancies and clarify how inversion affects face perception, the authors monitored inversion effects separately for vertical and horizontal distances between features. Inversion dramatically declined performance in the vertical-relational condition, but it impaired featural and horizontal-relational performance only moderately. Identical observations were made whether upright and inverted trials were blocked or randomly interleaved. The largest performance decrement was found for vertical relations even when faces were rotated by 90°. Evidence that inversion dramatically disrupts the ability to extract vertical but not horizontal feature relations supports the view that inversion qualitatively changes face perception by rendering some of the processes activated by upright faces largely ineffective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Faces are "spatial"--holistic face perception is supported by low spatial frequencies.

Faces are perceived holistically, a phenomenon best illustrated when the processing of a face feature is affected by the other features. Here, the authors tested the hypothesis that the holistic perception of a face mainly relies on its low spatial frequencies. Holistic face perception was tested in two classical paradigms: the whole-part advantage (Experiment 1) and the composite face effect (Experiments 2-4). Holistic effects were equally large or larger for low-pass filtered faces as compared to full-spectrum faces and significantly larger than for high-pass filtered faces. The disproportionate composite effect found for low-pass filtered faces was not observed when holistic perception was disrupted by inversion (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 showed that the composite face effect was enhanced only for low spatial frequencies, but not for intermediate spatial frequencies known be critical for face recognition. These findings indicate that holistic face perception is largely supported by low spatial frequencies. They also suggest that holistic processing precedes the analysis of local features during face perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Older adults' configural processing of faces: Role of second-order information.

Problems with face recognition are frequent in older adults. However, the mechanisms involved have only been partially discovered. In particular, it is unknown to what extent these problems may be related to changes in configural face processing. Here, we investigated the face inversion effect (FIE) together with the ability to detect modifications in the vertical or horizontal second-order relations between facial features. We used a same/different unfamiliar face discrimination task with 33 young and 33 older adults. The results showed dissociations in the performances of older versus younger adults. There was a lack of inversion effect during the recognition of original faces by older adults. However, for modified faces, older adults showed a pattern of performance similar to that of young participants, with preserved FIE for vertically modified faces and no detectable FIE for horizontally modified faces. Most importantly, the detection of vertical modifications was preserved in older relative to young adults whereas the detection of horizontal modifications was markedly diminished. We conclude that age has dissociable effects on configural face-encoding processes, with a relative preservation of vertical compared to horizontal second-order relations processing. These results help to understand some divergent results in the literature and may explain the spared familiar face identification abilities in the daily lives of older adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Face perception in high-functioning autistic adults: Evidence for superior processing of face parts, not for a configural face-processing deficit.

Configural processing in autism was studied in Experiment 1 by using the face inversion effect. A normal inversion effect was observed in the participants with autism, suggesting intact configural face processing. A priming paradigm using partial or complete faces served in Experiment 2 to assess both local and configural face processing. Overall, normal priming effects were found in participants with autism, irrespective of whether the partial face primes were intuitive face parts (i.e., eyes, nose, etc.) or arbitrary segments. An exception, however, was that participants with autism showed magnified priming with single face parts relative to typically developing control participants. The present findings argue for intact configural processing in autism along with an enhanced processing for individual face parts. The face-processing peculiarities known to characterize autism are discussed on the basis of these results and past congruent results with nonsocial stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Does face inversion change spatial frequency tuning?

The authors examined spatial frequency (SF) tuning of upright and inverted face identification using an SF variant of the Bubbles technique (F. Gosselin & P. G. Schyns, 2001). In Experiment 1, they validated the SF Bubbles technique in a plaid detection task. In Experiments 2a–c, the SFs used for identifying upright and inverted inner facial features were investigated. Although a clear inversion effect was present (mean accuracy was 24% higher and response times 455 ms shorter for upright faces), SF tunings were remarkably similar in both orientation conditions (mean r = .98; an SF band of 1.9 octaves centered at 9.8 cycles per face width for faces of about 6°). In Experiments 3a and b, the authors demonstrated that their technique is sensitive to both subtle bottom-up and top-down induced changes in SF tuning, suggesting that the null results of Experiments 2a–c are real. The most parsimonious explanation of the findings is provided by the quantitative account of the face inversion effect: The same information is used for identifying upright and inverted inner facial features, but processing has greater sensitivity with the former. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Not all faces are processed equally: Evidence for featural rather than holistic processing of one's own face in a face-imaging task.

The present work considers the mental imaging of faces, with a focus in own-face imaging. Experiments 1 and 3 demonstrated an own-face disadvantage, with slower generation of mental images of one's own face than of other familiar faces. In contrast, Experiment 2 demonstrated that mental images of facial parts are generated more quickly for one's own face. Finally, Experiment 4 established that a bias toward local processing is advantageous for one's own face, whereas a global-processing bias produces an enhanced own-face disadvantage. The results suggest that own-face imaging is more synchronized with retrieval of face features and less attuned to a face's holistic pattern than is imaging of other people's faces. The authors propose that the salient information for own and other face identification reflects, in part, differences in the purpose and experiences (expertise) generally associated with processing of own and other faces. Consistent with work examining the range of face processing, including other-race faces, our results suggest that not all faces receive the same holistic emphasis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Why does selective attention to parts fail in face processing?

One hallmark of holistic face processing is an inability to selectively attend to 1 face part while ignoring information in another part. In 3 sequential matching experiments, the authors tested perceptual and decisional accounts of holistic processing by measuring congruency effects between cued and uncued composite face halves shown in spatially aligned or disjointed configurations. The authors found congruency effects when the top and bottom halves of the study face were spatially aligned, misaligned (Experiment 1), or adjacent to one another (Experiment 2). However, at test, congruency effects were reduced by misalignment and abolished for adjacent configurations. This suggests that manipulations at test are more influential than manipulations at study, consistent with a decisional account of holistic processing. When encoding demands for study and test faces were equated (Experiment 3), the authors observed effects of study configuration suggesting that, consistent with a perceptual explanation, encoding does influence the magnitude of holistic processing. Together, these results cannot be accounted for by current perceptual or decisional accounts of holistic processing and suggest the existence of an attention-dependent mechanism that can integrate spatially separated face parts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Orienting to Eye Gaze and Face Processing.

The author conducted 7 experiments to examine possible interactions between orienting to eye gaze and specific forms of face processing. Participants classified a letter following either an upright or inverted face with averted, uninformative eye gaze. Eye gaze orienting effects were recorded for upright and inverted faces, irrespective of whether the faces were simple, schematic faces or more realistic faces. In contrast, inversion affected orienting to targets appearing along the vertical axis. Switching the contrast between the iris and sclera reversed orienting to eye gaze. Lifting the eyelid to expose more of the iris-sclera contrast led to a potentiation of orienting to eye gaze. Raising the eyebrow alone without the eyelid did not affect orienting. The findings suggest that local perceptual information is critical for orienting to eye gaze and that the effect can occur with a degree of independence from certain types of face processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

A spatial frequency account of the detriment that local processing of Navon letters has on face recognition.

Five minutes of processing the local features of a Navon letter causes a detriment in subsequent face-recognition performance (Macrae & Lewis, 2002). We hypothesize a perceptual after effect explanation of this effect in which face recognition is less accurate after adapting to high-spatial frequencies at high contrasts. Five experiments were conducted in which face-recognition performance was compared after processing high-contrast Navon stimuli. The standard recognition deficit was observed for processing the local features of Navon stimuli, but not if the stimuli were blurred (Experiment 1) or if they were of lower contrast (Experiment 2). A face-recognition deficit was observed after processing small, high-contrast letters equivalent to local processing of Navon letters (Experiment 3). Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that recognition of bandpass-filtered faces interacted with the type of Navon processing, in which the recognition of low-pass filtered faces was better following local rather than global processing. These results suggest that the Navon effect on subsequent face recognition is a perceptual phenomenon. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inversion and processing of component and spatial–relational information in faces.

This study compared effects of inversion on perceptual processing of faces with distorted components (eyes and mouths) and faces distorted by altering spatial relations between components. In a rating task, participants inversion reduced the rated grotesqueness of spatially distorted faces but not that of faces with altered components. In a comparison task, pairs of faces were shown side by side; participants judged whether they were identical or different. Inversion greatly reduced the rate at which participants responded within 3 s to pairs that differed spatially, but not pairs that differed componentially. Also, latencies for detecting spatial differences were lengthened by inversion more than latencies for detecting componential differences. Results support the hypothesis that inversion impairs encoding of spatial-relational information more than, or instead of, componential information, depending on the task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do all kids look alike? Evidence for an other-age effect in adults.

The current study provides evidence for the existence of an other-age effect (OAE), analogous to the well-documented other-race effect. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults are better at recognizing adult faces compared with faces of newborns and children. Results from Experiment 3 indicate that the OAE obtained with child faces can be modulated by experience. Moreover, in each of the 3 experiments, differences in the magnitude of the observed face inversion effect for each age class of faces were taken to reflect a difference in the processing strategies used to recognize the faces of each age. Evidence from Experiment 3 indicates that these strategies can be tuned by experience. The data are discussed with reference to an experience-based framework for face recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The face of aging: Sensitivity to facial feature relations changes with age.

Fundamental to face processing is the ability to encode information about the spatial relations among facial features (configural information). Using a bizarreness rating paradigm, we found older adults differed from young adults in rating configurally distorted faces (eyes, mouth inverted) as less bizarre across all tested orientations (0° to 180°), and were more vulnerable to orientation effects when faces were rotated beyond 90°. No age-related differences in perception of either unaltered faces or featurally distorted faces (eyes whitened, teeth blackened) occurred. These findings identify changes in sensitivity to configural information as an important factor in age-related differences in face perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Turning configural processing upside down: Part and whole body postures.

Like faces, body postures are susceptible to an inversion effect in untrained viewers. The inversion effect may be indicative of configural processing, but what kind of configural processing is used for the recognition of body postures must be specified. The information available in the body stimulus was manipulated. The presence and magnitude of inversion effects were compared for body parts, scrambled bodies, and body halves relative to whole bodies and to corresponding conditions for faces and houses. Results suggest that configural body posture recognition relies on the structural hierarchy of body parts, not the parts themselves or a complete template match. Configural recognition of body postures based on information about the structural hierarchy of parts defines an important point on the configural processing continuum, between recognition based on first-order spatial relations and recognition based on holistic undifferentiated template matching. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

No effect of inversion on attentional and affective processing of facial expressions.

The decrease in recognition performance after face inversion has been taken to suggest that faces are processed holistically. Three experiments, 1 with schematic and 2 with photographic faces, were conducted to assess whether face inversion also affected visual search for and implicit evaluation of facial expressions of emotion. The 3 visual search experiments yielded the same differences in detection speed between different facial expressions of emotion for upright and inverted faces. Threat superiority effects, faster detection of angry than of happy faces among neutral background faces, were evident in 2 experiments. Face inversion did not affect explicit or implicit evaluation of face stimuli as assessed with verbal ratings and affective priming. Happy faces were evaluated as more positive than angry, sad, or fearful/scheming ones regardless of orientation. Taken together these results seem to suggest that the processing of facial expressions of emotion is not impaired if holistic processing is disrupted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional Effects of Counterpredictive Gaze and Arrow Cues.

The authors used counterpredictive cues to examine reflexive and volitional orienting to eyes and arrows. Experiment 1 investigated the effects of eyes with a novel design that allowed for a comparison of gazed-at (cued) target locations and likely (predicted) target locations against baseline locations that were not cued and not predicted. Attention shifted reflexively to the cued location and volitionally to the predicted location, and these 2 forms of orienting overlapped in time. Experiment 2 discovered that another well-learned directional stimulus, an arrow, produced a different effect: Attention was shifted only volitionally to the predicted location. The authors suggest that because there is a neural architecture specialized for processing eyes, gaze-triggered attention is more strongly reflexive than orienting to arrows. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The combined effect of gaze direction and facial expression on cueing spatial attention.

Empirical evidence shows an effect of gaze direction on cueing spatial attention, regardless of the emotional expression shown by a face, whereas a combined effect of gaze direction and facial expression has been observed on individuals' evaluative judgments. In 2 experiments, the authors investigated whether gaze direction and facial expression affect spatial attention depending upon the presence of an evaluative goal. Disgusted, fearful, happy, or neutral faces gazing left or right were followed by positive or negative target words presented either at the spatial location looked at by the face or at the opposite spatial location. Participants responded to target words based on affective valence (i.e., positive/negative) in Experiment 1 and on letter case (lowercase/uppercase) in Experiment 2. Results showed that participants responded much faster to targets presented at the spatial location looked at by disgusted or fearful faces but only in Experiment 1, when an evaluative task was used. The present findings clearly show that negative facial expressions enhance the attentional shifts due to eye-gaze direction, provided that there was an explicit evaluative goal present. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of working memory in spatial S-R correspondence effects.

This study investigates the impact of working memory (WM) load on response conflicts arising from spatial (non) correspondence between irrelevant stimulus location and response location (Simon effect). The dominant view attributes the Simon effect to automatic processes of location-based response priming. The automaticity view predicts insensitivity of the Simon effect to manipulations of processing load. Four experiments investigated the role of spatial and verbal WM in horizontal and vertical Simon tasks by using a dual-task approach. Participants maintained different amounts of spatial or verbal information in WM while performing a horizontal or vertical Simon task. Results showed that high load generally decreased, and sometimes eliminated, the Simon effect. It is interesting to note that spatial load had a larger impact than verbal load on the horizontal Simon effect, whereas verbal load had a larger impact than spatial load on the vertical Simon effect. The results highlight the role of WM as the perception-action interface in choice-response tasks. Moreover, the results suggest spatial coding of horizontal stimulus-response (S-R) tasks, and verbal coding of vertical S-R tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Position and orientation features and the development of spatial concepts.

Tested the speed with which spatial information is classified into categories by asking 34 6-yr-olds, 35 10-yr-olds, 30 14-yr-olds, and 30 undergraduates to sort 6 decks of cards, each requiring a spatial judgment. Results indicate that (1) oblique discriminations required more processing time than did vertical–horizontal discriminations; (2) stimuli along the vertical axis were not processed significantly more quickly than stimuli along the horizontal axis; and (3) position variations slowed orientation discriminations, especially if the lines were of oblique orientation. The effect of position variations was particularly marked for the 6-yr-olds. The role of positional cues in spatial organization, as well as aspects of developmental changes in spatial concepts and strategies, are discussed. (French abstract) (11 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

It's all in your head: Why is the body inversion effect abolished for headless bodies?

It has been recently argued that human bodies are processed by a specialized processing mechanism. Central evidence was that body inversion reduces recognition abilities (body inversion effect; BIE) as much as it does for faces, but more than for other objects. Here we showed that the BIE is markedly reduced for headless bodies and examined the reason for this unexpected finding. Two alternative hypotheses were examined. Either the BIE is reduced for any type of incomplete body, or the head plays a special role in discrimination of body posture. Results show that omission of other body parts (leg or arms) did not influence the magnitude of the BIE relative to complete bodies. Analogous manipulations with faces did not influence the magnitude of the face inversion effect. Importantly, similar to effects we found for headless bodies, discrimination abilities for upright bodies and the BIE were markedly reduced for complete bodies that did not differ in head posture. We conclude that intact discrimination of body posture relies heavily on the head position. Our findings also imply that the BIE and the face inversion effect may be generated by different mechanisms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Task-irrelevant angry faces capture attention in visual search while modulated by resources.

We investigated the attentional capture effect of emotional faces under sufficient or restricted attentional conditions. In a modified visual search paradigm, three kinds of schematic faces (angry, happy, and neutral) served as stimuli. Participants were instructed to search for a target face indicated by a dot and to respond to the dot's position. In this design, the emotional content of the face is task-irrelevant and does not need to be attended. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that having an angry face as the target face elicited a faster response than did the neutral target face, and when the angry face is used as a distractor, the response to the target was delayed compared to the response with no such distractor. Experiment 2 included inverted faces to decrease emotional content; results showed that inversion of the faces reduced the effect of angry faces on the search performance. When attention was cued to a specific area in Experiment 3, the effect of angry faces outside of the cued area became weaker. In conclusion, the results indicate that a task-irrelevant angry face can capture attention beyond top-down control, but this effect is modulated by the availability of attentional resources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)