Inversion disrupts both configural and featural face processing equally

Abstract

Previous studies that used configural vs. featural information manipulations in the investigation of the face inversion effect have reported a confined effect to configural manipulations, widely interpreted as reflecting the dominance of configural information in face processing. We suggest that such hypothesis is based on studies where configural and featural task difficulty were mismatched. Specifically, the featurally altered faces were easier to discriminate than the configurally altered ones when upright. In two experiments we compared the size of the inversion effect between configurally and featurally altered sets of faces when upright performance of both conditions were intentionally matched or mismatched. The magnitude of the inversion effect was comparable for configural and featural conditions when the sets of stimuli were well matched for discriminability, but diverged when the sets were intentionally mismatched. The results provide support against the view that inverted faces are processed in a qualitatively different way.