Upright Face Processing Research Articles

The face inversion effect does not provide a pure measure of holistic face processing.

It is widely held that upright faces are processed more holistically than inverted faces and that this difference is reflected in the face inversion effect. It is not clear, however, how the inversion effect can best be measured, whether it is task specific, or even whether it specifically correlates with processing of upright faces. We examined these questions in a large sample (N = 420) who provided data on processing of upright and inverted stimuli in two different tasks with faces and one with objects. We find that the inversion effects are task dependent, and that they do not correlate better among face processing tasks than they do across face and object processing tasks. These findings were obtained regardless of whether inversion effects were measured by means of difference scores or regression. In comparison, only inversion effects based on regression predicted performance with upright faces in tasks other than those the inversion effects were derived from. Critically, however, inversion effects based on regression also predicted performance with inverted faces to a similar degree as they predicted performance with upright faces. Consequently, and contrary to what is commonly assumed, inversion effects do not seem to capture effects specific to holistic processing of upright faces. While the present findings do not bring us closer to an understanding of which changes in cognitive processing are induced by inversion, they do suggest that inversion effects do not reflect a unitary construct; an implicit assumption that seems to characterize much of the research regarding face processing.

Cortical Pathways or Mechanism in the Face Inversion Effect in Patients with First-Episode Schizophrenia.

ObjectiveImpaired face perception is considered as a hallmark of social disability in schizophrenia. It is widely believed that inverted faces and upright faces are processed by distinct mechanisms. Previous studies have identified that individuals with schizophrenia display poorer face processing than controls. However, the mechanisms underlying the face inversion effect (FIE) in patients with first-episode schizophrenia (FSZ) remain unclear.MethodsWe designed an fMRI task to investigate the FIE mechanism in patients with schizophrenia. Thirty-four patients with FSZ and thirty-five healthy controls (CON) underwent task-related fMRI scanning, clinical assessment, anhedonia experience examination, and social function and cognitive function evaluation.ResultsThe patients with FSZ exhibited distinct functional activity regarding upright and inverted face processing within the cortical face and non-face network. These results suggest that the differences in quantitative processing might mediate the FIE in schizophrenia. Compared with controls, affected patients showed impairments in processing both upright and inverted faces; and for these patients with FSZ, upright face processing was associated with more severe and broader impairment than inverted face processing. Reduced response in the left middle occipital gyrus for upright face processing was related to poorer performance of social function outcomes evaluated using the Personal and Social Performance Scale.ConclusionOur data suggested that patients with FSZ exhibited similar performance in processing inverted faces and upright faces, but were less efficient than controls; and for these patients, inverted faces are processed less efficiently than upright faces. We also provided a clue that the mechanism under abnormal FIE might be related to an aberrant activation of non-face-selective areas instead of abnormal activation of face-specific areas in patients with schizophrenia. Finally, our study indicated that the neural pathway for upright recognition might be relevant in determining the functional outcomes of this devastating disorder.

Rapid forgetting of faces in congenital prosopagnosia

Congenital prosopagnosia (CP) is a life-long impairment in face recognition that occurs in the absence of any known brain damage. It is still unclear whether this disorder is related to a visual deficit, or to an impairment in encoding, maintaining or retrieving a face from memory. We tested CPs and matched neurotypical controls using a delayed estimation task in which a target face was shown either upright or inverted. Participants were asked to select the target face out of a cyclic space of morphed faces that could either resemble the target face, or not. The inclusion of upright and inverted faces enabled to examine the extent of the face inversion effect, a well-known face specific effect often associated with holistic processing. To enable disentangling visual from mnemonic processing, reports were required either following 1 and 6 sec retention interval, or simultaneously while the target face was still visible. Controls showed slower forgetting of upright compared to inverted faces. In contrast, CPs exhibited rapid forgetting of upright faces that was comparable to their performance and to performance of controls on inverted faces. Such forgetting was evident in random errors in which the selected faces did not resemble the face in memory, implying a time related decrease in the probability to access the correct face in memory. Importantly, CPs exhibited no inversion effect across all retention intervals, including the simultaneous one, suggesting that their abnormal rapid forgetting could be explained by an impairment in holistic visual processing of upright faces.

Testing Differential Holistic Processing Within a Face: No Evidence of Asymmetry from the Complete Composite Task.

The composite face task is one of the most popular research paradigms for measuring holistic processing of upright faces. The exact mechanism underlying holistic processing remains elusive and controversial, and some studies have suggested that holistic processing may not be evenly distributed, in that the top-half of a face might induce stronger holistic processing than its bottom-half counterpart. In two experiments, we further examined the possibility of asymmetric holistic processing. Prior to Experiment 1, we confirmed that perceptual discriminability was equated between top and bottom face halves; we found no differences in performance between top and bottom face halves when they were presented individually. Then, in Experiment 1, using the composite face task with the complete design to reduce response bias, we failed to obtain evidence that would support the notion of asymmetric holistic processing between top and bottom face halves. To further reduce performance variability and to remove lingering holistic effects observed in the misaligned condition in Experiment 1, we doubled the number of trials and increased misalignment between top and bottom face halves to make misalignment more salient in Experiment 2. Even with these additional manipulations, we were unable to find evidence indicative of asymmetric holistic processing. Taken together, these findings suggest that holistic processing is distributed homogenously within an upright face.

Three-month-old infants' sensitivity to horizontal information within faces.

Horizontal information is crucial to face processing in adults. Yet the ontogeny of this preferential type of processing remains unknown. To clarify this issue, we tested 3-month-old infants' sensitivity to horizontal information within faces. Specifically, infants were exposed to the simultaneous presentation of a face and a car presented in upright or inverted orientation while their looking behavior was recorded. Face and car images were either broadband (UNF) or filtered to only reveal horizontal (H), vertical (V) or this combined information (HV). As expected, infants looked longer at upright faces than at upright cars, but critically, only when horizontal information was preserved in the stimulus (UNF, HV, H). These results first indicate that horizontal information already drives upright face processing at 3 months of age. They also recall the importance, for infants, of some facial features, arranged in a top-heavy configuration, particularly revealed by this band of information. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 58: 536-542, 2016.

Real-world interattribute distances lead to inefficient face gender categorization.

The processing of interattribute distances is believed to be critical for upright face categorization. A recent study by Taschereau-Dumouchel, Rossion, Schyns, and Gosselin (2010) challenged this idea by showing that participants were nearly at chance when asked to identify faces on the sole basis of real-world interattribute distances, while they were nearly perfect when all other facial cues were shown. However, it remains possible that humans are highly tuned to interattribute distances but that the information conveyed by these cues is scarce. We tested this hypothesis by contrasting the efficiencies-a measure of performance that factors out task difficulty-of 60 observers in 6 face gender categorization tasks. Our main finding is that efficiencies for faces that varied only in terms of their interattribute distances were an order of magnitude lower than efficiencies for faces that varied in all respects, except their interattribute distances, or in all respects. These results provide a definitive blow to the idea that real-world interattribute distances are critical for upright face processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

In This Issue

In This Issue

A U-shaped relation between sitting ability and upright face processing in infants.

A growing body of research indicates connections exist between action, perception, and cognition in infants. In this study, associated changes between sitting ability and upright face processing were tested in 111 infants. Using the visual habituation "switch" task (C. H. Cashon & L. B. Cohen, 2004; L. B. Cohen & C. H. Cashon, 2001), holistic processing of faces was assessed in same-aged non- and near sitters (22-25 weeks) and same-aged new and expert sitters (27-32 weeks). U-shaped relation was found between sitting stage and holistic face processing such that only nonsitters and expert sitters processed faces holistically. It is posited that the results are due to a reorganization of the upright face-processing system resulting from infants' learning to sit independently and trying to incorporate the meaning of upright faces.

Perceptual integrality of componential and configural information in faces

The relative contribution of componential and configural information to face perception is controversial. We addressed this issue in the present study by examining how componential information and configural information interact during face processing, using Garner's (1974) speeded classification paradigm. When classifying upright faces varying in components (eyes, nose, and mouth) and configural information (intereyes and nose-mouth spacing), observers could not selectively attend to components without being influenced by irrelevant variation in configural information, and vice versa, indicating that componential information and configural information are integral in upright face processing. Performance with inverted faces showed selective attention to components but not to configural information, implying dominance of componential information in processing inverted faces. When faces varied only in components, selective attention to different components was observed in upright and inverted faces, indicating that facial components are perceptually separable. These results provide strong evidence that integrality of componential and configural information, rather than the relative dominance of either, is the hallmark of upright face perception.

Are deficits in emotional face processing preventing perception of the Thatcher illusion in a case of prosopagnosia?

Behavioural studies using the Thatcher illusion are usually assumed to demonstrate configurality in upright face processing. Previously, we have reported on PHD, an individual with prosopagnosia, could not discriminate Thatcherized faces but showed some evidence for residual face processing (VSS, 09). Recent functional imaging data suggests a role for emotional expression perception in discriminating Thatcherized from neutral faces (Donnelly & Hadjikhani, in preparation). Here we report on a series of emotion perception tasks were conducted on PHD and control participants. Results for PHD revealed: (1) specific deficits for distinguishing magnitude of anger and disgust; (2) poor sensitivity when discriminating faces as one of two given emotions; (3) a within category deficit for intensity, but no intensity deficit between emotions unless disgust was present; (4) a different solution for PHD relative to controls in respect of a multidimensional scaling study for sameness judgements of faces varying in emotion identity and intensity. We consider possible relationships between PHDs emotion perception and his ability to discriminate Thatcherised from normal faces.

Why is the N170 enhanced for inverted faces? An ERP competition experiment

The amplitude of the ERP component N170 is larger in response to inverted than to upright faces. The current study tested two main hypotheses that have been suggested to explain this effect: according to the first hypothesis inverted faces lead to augmentation of activity of the same neural populations used for the processing of upright faces due to the increased processing difficulty that these stimuli impose; according to the second hypothesis the processing of inverted faces involves recruitment of additional neural mechanisms to those used for upright face processing. We employed an ERP competition paradigm in which the effect of a context stimulus on the ERP to a simultaneously presented target stimulus is measured. In Experiment 1, an upright target face was paired with an upright face, inverted face or a non-face context stimulus. ERPs time-locked to the presentation of the target showed reduced N170 amplitude when the context was an upright face more than in non-face context trials, replicating the ERP competition effect for faces. Interestingly, in contrast to the hypothesis that inverted faces recruit mechanisms used for upright faces to a greater extent, competition effects were similar in the context of inverted and upright faces. In Experiment 2, the target stimuli were inverted faces. This time, competition effect was larger in inverted than in upright face context. Taken together, these findings correspond with the hypothesis that inversion of the face leads to recruitment of additional mechanisms as early as at the N170 time-window.

ERP responses differentiate inverted but not upright face processing in adults with ASD

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have documented deficits in face processing, face memory and abnormal activation of the neural circuitry that supports these functions. To examine speed of processing of faces in ASD, high density event-related brain potentials were recorded to images of faces, inverted faces and non-face objects from 32 high-functioning adults with ASD and controls. Participants were instructed to focus on a cross hair prior to stimulus onset; the cross-hair location directed the participant's eye gaze to the eye region at stimulus onset. Although the ASD group preformed more poorly on behavioral tests of face and object memory, both groups demonstrated similar ERP responses, characterized by greater (positive) P1 and (negative) N170 amplitude to faces vs houses. N170 speed of processing to faces did not differ between groups. However, only the control group demonstrated differential responses to upright vs inverted faces. For the ASD group, the differential response to inverted vs upright faces was associated with better performance on face memory and self-reported social skills. It is possible that the use of attention cues may facilitate face processing in high-functioning adults with ASD, suggesting that the underlying neural circuitry can be activated in adults with ASD under specific demands.

The Magnetoencephalographic Response to Upright and Inverted Face Stimuli in a Patient With Williams Syndrome

The processing of faces in a patient with Williams syndrome was investigated using magnetoencephalography by evaluating responses to upright and inverted face stimuli. His processing of upright faces was not different from that of healthy adults. However, the processing of inverted faces was faster than those of healthy adults and faster than his processing of upright faces. The result indicated the absence of face inversion effect usually observed in healthy adults.

The Faces of Development: A Review of Early Face Processing over Childhood

The understanding of the adult proficiency in recognizing and extracting information from faces is still limited despite the number of studies over the last decade. Our knowledge on the development of these capacities is even more restricted, as only a handful of such studies exist. Here we present a combined reanalysis of four ERP studies in children from 4 to 15 years of age and adults (n = 424, across the studies), which investigated face processing in implicit and explicit tasks. We restricted these analyses to what was common across studies: early ERP components and upright face processing across all four studies and the inversion effect, investigated in three of the studies. These data demonstrated that processing faces implicates very rapid neural activity, even in young children--at the P1 component--with protracted age-related change in both P1 and N170, that were sensitive to the different task demands. Inversion produced latency and amplitude effects on the P1 from the youngest group, but on N170 only starting in mid childhood. These developmental data suggest that there are functionally different sources of the P1 and N170, related to the processing of different aspects of faces.