Abstract
Face perception is impaired for inverted images, and a prominent example of this is the Thatcher illusion: "Thatcherized" (i.e., rotated) eyes and mouths make a face look grotesque, but only if the whole face is seen upright rather than inverted. Inversion effects are often interpreted as evidence for configural face processing. However, recent findings have led to the alternative proposal that the Thatcher illusion rests on orientation sensitivity for isolated facial regions. Here, we tested whether the Thatcher effect depends not only on the orientation of facial regions but also on their visual-field location. Using a match-to-sample task with isolated eye and mouth regions we found a significant Feature × Location interaction. Observers were better at discriminating Thatcherized from normal eyes in the upper compared to the lower visual field, and vice versa for mouths. These results show that inversion effects can at least partly be driven by nonconfigural factors and that one of these factors is a match between facial features and their typical visual-field location. This echoes recent results showing feature-location effects in face individuation. We discuss the role of these findings for the hypothesis that spatial and feature tuning in the ventral stream are linked.
Highlights
Theories of face perception emphasize the importance of configural processing, referring to the arrangement and distance of face parts from each other as well as their integration into a whole (Bruce &Young, 1986; Maurer, Le Grand, & Mondloch, 2002; Rhodes, 1988)
Having established the predicted Thatcher effect of atypical visual-field location for facial features, we tested the effect of inversion on isolated facial regions
Face-inversion effects like the Thatcher illusion are often interpreted to result from disrupted configural processing (Bartlett & Searcy, 1993; Maurer et al, 2002; Murray et al, 2000; Rossion, 2009)
Summary
Theories of face perception emphasize the importance of configural processing, referring to the arrangement and distance of face parts from each other as well as their integration into a whole (Bruce &Young, 1986; Maurer, Le Grand, & Mondloch, 2002; Rhodes, 1988). When eyes and mouth within a face image are rotated by 1808, the resulting ‘‘Thatcherized’’ image looks grotesque This manipulation is strikingly obvious only when the Thatcherized image is upright—observers perceive it as much subtler, and can miss it entirely, when the Thatcherized image itself is shown upside down. This dramatic difference (like other face-inversion effects) has been interpreted as the result of disrupted configural processing (Bartlett & Searcy, 1993; Maurer et al, 2002; Murray, Yong, & Rhodes, 2000; Rossion, 2009)
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