The Effect of Rotation on Configural Encoding in a Face-Matching Task

Abstract

A considerable amount of research has shown that inverting a face disrupts the recognition of that faceöan effect which is disproportionate to that of inverting other objects, such as houses or aeroplanes (Yin 1969). There is a variety of evidence to suggest that it is information about the configuration of facial features (their relative arrangement to each other within a face) that is disrupted by inversion, and that inversion is more disruptive to the processing of configural information than to that of featural information. Searcy and Bartlett (1996) found effects of inversion on a simultaneouscomparison task with spatially distorted and featurally distorted faces. Inversion significantly hindered participants' ability to decide, within a given time frame, that a pair of spatially distorted faces were the same or different; but this effect was not found with featurally distorted pairs, and responses made within this time feature (3 s) were longer for detecting configural differences than for detecting featural changes. There is, therefore, evidence to suggest that the processing of upright, normal faces is largely dependent on configural processing, whereas inverted faces are thought to require a more featural means of processing (see also Bartlett and Searcy 1993;Rhodes et al 1993;Lewis and Johnston 1997).It is important to note that, although there is a wide range of evidence to support the notion that two types of encoding öconfigural and featuralöare involved in face perception, a number of different terms have been used to refer to different definitions of these types of information. Terms such as`second-order relational information', configural' information, and`holistic' information have referred to configural information as being the combination of components that make up an individual face (eg Sergent 1984), or the configuration formed by the individual arrangements of facial features (eg Diamond and Carey 1986; Bartlett and Searcy 1993). Nevertheless, featural information is generally regarded as the presence of a particular feature or type of feature and the encoding of these parts independent of their context (Diamond and Carey 1986), whereas configural information is gained from the relative arrangement ofThe effect of rotation on configural encoding in a face-matching task Perception, 2007, volume Abstract. Inversion disrupts encoding of faces because of the disruption of configural encoding as evident in the Thatcher illusion (Thompson 1980, Perception 9 483^484). Here we consider the effect of rotation on the loss of configural encoding in a same/different matching paradigm. Participants decided whether two faces were of the same type (both normal or both Thatcherised) or not, at five angles of rotation (08, 458, 908, 1358, 1808). When the faces were both of the same person, the disruption due to rotation for`same-type' judgments was linear and approximately equal for normal and Thatcherised face pairs. In experiment 2, with different-person face pairs, the effect of rotation was much great...

The Thatcher illusion in humans and monkeys

“…(a) The Thatcher illusion in humans As mentioned earlier, the Thatcher illusion has been shown psychophysically using rating tasks (Parks et al 1985;Bartlett & Searcy 1993;Murray et al 2000), recognition rates (Rhodes et al 1993), habituation (Bertin & Bhatt 2004) and perceptual comparison tasks (Bartlett & Searcy 1993;Searcy & Bartlett 1996;Leder et al 2001;Edmonds & Lewis 2007) and has become an important tool for the exploration of processing strategies. A continuous rotation along the image-plane axis induces a shift from holistic and part-based processing to part-based processing strategies.…”

“…By means of inversion, also referred to as face inversion, holistic processing is impaired, thus leaving local feature inversions undetected. In humans, the Thatcher illusion has been investigated extensively with psychophysical measurements of ratings (Parks et al 1985;Bartlett & Searcy 1993;Murray et al 2000), recognition (Rhodes et al 1993), habituation (Bertin & Bhatt 2004) and perceptual comparison tasks (Bartlett & Searcy 1993;Searcy & Bartlett 1996;Leder et al 2001;Edmonds & Lewis 2007), as well as neurophysiological measurements (Milivojevic et al 2003;Carbon et al 2005;Boutsen et al 2006;Gu et al 2007) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (Rotshtein et al 2001).…”

Visual MMN elicited by orientation changes of faces

“…It has been shown that recognizing faces in adults is attributed to holistic/con¯gural processing, whereas the object identi¯cation is mainly based on featural processing (see for a review, Maurer et al, 2002). Recently, there was evidence that the change of face orientation make holistic/ con¯gural processing less e±cient (Schwaninger & Mast, 2005; also see, Edmonds & Lewis, 2007;Jacques & Rossion, 2007;Rossion, 2008). Interestingly, several studies examined the in°uence of attention on con¯gural processing of faces.…”

Correlations between psychometric schizotypy, scan path length, fixations on the eyes and face recognition

“…Indeed, Dickey et al (2010) have found that the fusiform gyrus (a part of the brain that is considered critical to configural coding in face recognition, Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997) is abnormal in patients with schizophrenia (see also Fakra, Salgado-Pineda, Delaveau, Hariri, & Blin, 2008). Schwartz, Marvel, Drapalski, Rosso, and Deutsch (2002), however, have shown that patients with schizophrenia showed as large a face-inversion effect (an index of configural coding, Edmonds & Lewis, 2007) as non-patients, indicating that configural coding is unaffected in schizophrenia. If schizotypy is related to a reliance on featural coding (coding of information based on the constituent parts independently), we might expect to see changes in paraphernalia to cause deficits in face recognition.…”