Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 12, 2026

Quantifying Abdominal Pigmentation in Drosophila melanogaster
Published on: June 1, 2017
The role of surface pigmentation for recognition revealed by contrast reversal in faces and Greebles
Quoc C Vuong1, Jessie J Peissig, Marianne C Harrison
1Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Spemannstr. 38, 72076 Tübingen, Germany. quoc.vuong@tuebingen.mpg.de
Abstract:
Faces are difficult to recognize when viewed as negatives [Galper (1970). Recognition of faces in photographic negative. Psychonomic Science, 19, 207]. Here we examined the contribution of surface properties to this contrast effect, and whether it is modulated by object category. We tested observers in a matching task using faces or Greebles, presented with or without pigmentation. When stimulus pairs were shown with mismatched contrast (e.g., positive-negative), there was a decrement in performance. This decrement was larger when the stimuli were shown with pigmentation, and this difference was more pronounced with faces than with Greebles. Overall, contrast reversal disrupts the recognition of both faces and objects to a greater degree in the presence of pigmentation, suggesting that surface properties are important components of the object representation.
Related Concept Videos
Anatomy of the Eyeball
Photoreceptors and Visual Pathways
Color Vision
Gestalt Principles of Perception
Prosopagnosia

