The face inversion effect is a defection in performance in recognizing inverted faces compared with faces presented in their usual upright orientation typically believed to be specific for facial stimuli. McLaren (1997) was able to demonstrate that (a) an inversion effect could be obtained with exemplars drawn from a familiar category, such that upright exemplars were better discriminated than inverted exemplars; and (b) that the inversion effect required that the familiar category be prototype-defined. In this article, we replicate and extend these findings. We show that the inversion effect can be obtained in a standard old/new recognition memory paradigm, demonstrate that it is contingent on familiarization with a prototype-defined category, and establish that the effect is made up of two components. We confirm the advantage for upright exemplars drawn from a familiar, prototype-defined category, and show that there is a disadvantage for inverted exemplars drawn from this category relative to suitable controls. We also provide evidence that there is an N170 event-related potential signature for this effect. These results allow us to integrate a theory of perceptual learning originally proposed by McLaren, Kaye, and Mackintosh (1989) with explanations of the face inversion effect, first reported by Yin.

HighlightsMost work on proactive inhibitory control (PIC) is descriptive.The theoretical accounts focus primarily on response- or motor-related processes.We show that PIC biases stimulus detection and response selection.We also demonstrate an overlap between various forms of proactive control.Based on our findings, we propose a general biasing account for PIC.

The present study explores the link between attentional reorienting and response inhibition. Recent behavioral and neuroscience work indicates that both might rely on similar cognitive and neural mechanisms. We tested 2 popular accounts of the overlap: The "circuit breaker" account, which assumes that unexpected events produce global suppression of motor output, and the "stimulus detection" account, which assumes that attention is reoriented to unexpected events. In Experiment 1, we presented standard and (unexpected) novel sounds in a go/no-go task. Consistent with the stimulus detection account, we found longer reaction times on go trials and higher rates of commission errors on no-go trials when these were preceded by a novel sound compared with a standard sound. In Experiment 2, novel and standard sounds acted as no-go signals. In this experiment, the novel sounds produced an improvement on no-go trials. This further highlights the importance of stimulus detection for response inhibition. Combined, the 2 experiments support the idea that attention is oriented to novel or unexpected events, impairing no-go performance if these events are irrelevant but enhancing no-go performance when they are relevant. Our findings also indicate that the popular circuit breaker account of the overlap between response inhibition and attentional reorienting needs some revision.

One important debate in psycholinguistics concerns the nature of morphological decomposition processes in visual word recognition (e.g., darkness = {dark} + {-ness}). One theory claims that these processes arise during orthographic analysis and prior to accessing meaning (Rastle & Davis, 2008), and another argues that these processes arise through greater temporal overlap between the activation of orthographic and semantic information (Feldman, O'Connor, & Moscoso del Prado Martín, 2009). This issue has been the subject of intense debate in studies using masked priming but has yet to be resolved unequivocally. The present study takes another approach to resolving this controversy by examining brain potentials as participants made lexical decisions to unprimed morphological (darkness), pseudomorphological (corner), and nonmorphological (brothel) stimuli. Results revealed a difference from ∼190 ms between the nonmorphological condition and the other 2 conditions (which showed no differentiation), a likely correlate of morphological processing reliant exclusively on orthography. Only 60-70 ms later was there evidence of the activation of semantic information, when the pseudomorphological condition diverged from the other 2 conditions. These results provide unambiguous support for a hierarchical model of morphological processing whereby decomposition is based initially on orthographic analysis and is only later constrained by semantic information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

This paper reports results from three experiments that investigate how a particular neurostimulation procedure is able, in certain circumstances, to selectively increase the face inversion effect by enhancing recognition for upright faces, and argues that these effects can be understood in terms of the MKM theory of stimulus representation. We demonstrate how a specific transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) methodology can improve performance in circumstances where error-based salience modulation is making face recognition harder. The three experiments used an old/new recognition task involving sets of normal vs Thatcherised faces. The main characteristic of Thatcherised faces is that the eyes and the mouth are upside down, thus emphasizing features that tend to be common to other Thatcherised faces and so leading to stronger generalization making recognition worse. Experiment 1 combined a behavioural and ERP study looking at the N170 peak component, which helped us to calibrate the set of face stimuli needed for subsequent experiments. In Experiment 2 we used our tDCS procedure (between-subjects and double-blind) in an attempt to reduce the negative effects induced by error-based modulation of salience on recognition of upright Thatcherised faces.Results largely confirmed our predictions. In addition, they showed a significant improvement on recognition performance for upright normal faces. Experiment 3 provides the first direct evidence in a single study that the same tDCS procedure is able to both enhance performance when normal faces are presented with Thatcherised faces, and to reduce performance when normal faces are presented with other normal faces (i.e. male vs female faces). We interpret our results by analyzing how salience modulation influences generalization between similar categories of stimuli.