Abstract
Face inversion produces a detrimental effect on face recognition. The extent to which the inversion of faces and other kinds of objects influences the perceptual binding of visual information into global forms is not known. We used a behavioral method and functional MRI (fMRI) to measure the effect of face inversion on visual persistence, a type of perceptual memory that reflects sustained awareness of global form. We found that upright faces persisted longer than inverted versions of the same images; we observed a similar effect of inversion on the persistence of animal stimuli. This effect of inversion on persistence was evident in sustained fMRI activity throughout the ventral visual hierarchy, including the lateral occipital area (LO), two face-selective visual areas—the fusiform face area (FFA) and the occipital face area (OFA)—and several early visual areas. V1 showed the same initial fMRI activation to upright and inverted forms but this activation lasted longer for upright stimuli. The inversion effect on persistence-related fMRI activity in V1 and other retinotopic visual areas demonstrates that higher-tier visual areas influence early visual processing via feedback. This feedback effect on figure-ground processing is sensitive to the orientation of the figure.
Highlights
Face inversion produces a detrimental effect on recognition [1], and this effect is thought to reflect a failure of configural processing [2,3,4,5]—the binding of facial features into a unified perceptual representation [6]
Neurophysiological studies have shown that face inversion influences visual processing during the first 170 ms of visual processing [7,8,9,10], and several functional magnetic resonance imaging studies suggest that the fusiform face area (FFA) [11] is the neural basis of the face inversion effect on recognition [12,13,14,15,16]
We found that face inversion corresponded to decreased functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) peaks in face-selective cortex but not lateral occipital cortex (LO), whereas animal inversion decreased the peak fMRI response in all three of our ROIs
Summary
Face inversion produces a detrimental effect on recognition [1], and this effect is thought to reflect a failure of configural (or ‘holistic’) processing [2,3,4,5]—the binding of facial features into a unified perceptual representation [6]. Neurophysiological studies have shown that face inversion influences visual processing during the first 170 ms of visual processing [7,8,9,10], and several functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies suggest that the fusiform face area (FFA) [11] is the neural basis of the face inversion effect on recognition [12,13,14,15,16] These findings are consistent with increasing consensus that the face inversion effect originates during perceptual encoding rather than long-term memory [17,18,19,20]. The duration of persistence measured via subjective report has been corroborated by neural evidence of persistence measured with fMRI [23,24,25,26] These studies consistently showed persistence-related activity in object-selective lateral occipital cortex (LO), an area that is known to mediate the binding of early visual information into representations of global form [27,28]. Two of the studies [25,26] showed persistence-related activity as early as V2, which the authors proposed was due to feedback from LO during figureground segregation
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