Face imagery is based on featural representations

The effect of imagery on featural and configural face processing was investigated using blurred and scrambled faces. By means of blurring, featural information is reduced; by scrambling a face into its constituent parts configural information is lost. Twenty-four participants learned ten faces together with the sound of a name. In following matching-to-sample tasks participants had to decide whether an auditory presented name belonged to a visually presented scrambled or blurred face in two experimental conditions. In the imagery condition, the name was presented prior to the visual stimulus and participants were required to imagine the corresponding face as clearly and vividly as possible. In the perception condition name and test face were presented simultaneously, thus no facilitation via mental imagery was possible. Analyses of the hit values showed that in the imagery condition scrambled faces were recognized significantly better than blurred faces whereas there was no such effect for the perception condition. The results suggest that mental imagery activates featural representations more than configural representations.