Abstract
“Facial inversion effects” refers to the findings that recognition of inverted faces is less accurate than recognition of upright faces. We now report inversion effects for isolated facial features: forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, and chin. This shows that configurational information extracted from a whole face (i.e., from spatial relationships among the facial features) is not necessary for obtaining the inversion effects. Other factors, such as “upright-orientation,” mental rotation, and feature saliency, account for the inversion effects both in a whole face and in its isolated features. We propose a simple formula that satisfactorily predicts the recognition of a whole face and the inversion effects for that face on the basis of its individual features.
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This research was supported by the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (Grant 89-00254). The present experiments consisted of Brosh Teucher’s Master’s thesis, supervised by the first author. We would like to express our gratitude to Micah Leshem, Ilan Fisher, and Ramzi Suleiman, who read an earlier draft of the present paper and made helpful suggestions.
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Rakover, S.S., Teucher, B. Facial inversion effects: Parts and whole relationship. Perception & Psychophysics 59, 752–761 (1997). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206021
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206021