Cortical correlates of face and scene inversion: a comparison

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Visual Perception
• Neuroimaging

Background:

• Face recognition is uniquely susceptible to inversion (face inversion effect, FIE).
• Specialized processing for environmental scenes is suggested but not empirically confirmed via inversion effects.
• Previous research indicates distinct neural pathways for faces and scenes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether scene inversion elicits a behavioral and neural effect comparable to face inversion.
• To compare the neural correlates of face and scene inversion using neuroimaging.
• To determine if inversion shifts processing from specialized to generic object recognition mechanisms for both faces and scenes.

Main Methods:

• Behavioral continuous visual matching task assessing face and scene recognition under upright and inverted conditions.
• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine neural responses in object- and scene-selective brain regions.
• Whole-brain analysis to identify regions differentially activated by upright versus inverted stimuli.

Main Results:

• Both face and scene inversion induced behavioral penalties, though the scene inversion effect was less robust and diminished over time.
• Scene inversion increased neural activity in the lateral occipital (LO) area and decreased it in the parahippocampal place area (PPA).
• Face inversion increased activity in LO and the right middle fusiform (MF) area but did not alter fusiform face area (FFA) response, suggesting a shift from specialized to generic processing.

Conclusions:

• Both face and scene inversion shift visual processing towards more general object recognition mechanisms.
• This shift results in a reliable behavioral deficit specifically for face recognition, not scene recognition.
• The findings highlight differential sensitivity to inversion between face and scene processing pathways.