The ups and downs of face perception: evidence for holistic encoding of upright and inverted faces

A visual-search task was used to investigate the influence of facial organisation on discrimination of an internal facial feature. Participants searched for a downturned mouth in arrays of one to six faces that differed only in the target feature, with distractor faces containing an upturned mouth. Feature search was tested in four different face contexts: upright unaltered faces, inverted unaltered faces, upright faces in which the internal features were scrambled, or inverted scrambled faces. Normal face organisation facilitated feature search in upright faces, but slowed it in inverted faces. These findings demonstrate an interdependence of features and their configuration in the perceptual analysis of both upright and inverted faces.