Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 24, 2025

Measuring Attention and Visual Processing Speed by Model-based Analysis of Temporal-order Judgments
Published on: January 23, 2017
Large inversion effects for common objects and objects that require little if any holistic processing
1Department of Psychology, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230, Odense M, Denmark. cgerlach@health.sdu.dk.
Abstract:
It is widely assumed that faces are processed holistically whereas objects are not because only face recognition efficiency is greatly affected when stimuli are presented upside-down. This phenomenon - the face inversion effect - has been taken as support for both theories of domain-specificity and expertise, and as an index of holistic/configural processing. The present study, which comprised 122 Danish psychology students, demonstrates that large inversion effects can be found for objects too, even when they do not belong to categories of expertise or are structurally similar. Furthermore, inversion effects were also found in conditions that require little if any holistic processing. While these findings do not refute that face processing may be domain-specific, a product of expertise, or that inversion effects can reflect holistic/configural processing, they do suggest that inversion effects by themselves provide little specific evidence in favor of any these assumptions.
Related Concept Videos
Depth Perception and Spatial Vision
Perceptual Constancy
Size constancy is the recognition that an object remains the same size, even when its image on the retina changes. For instance, a bus is perceived to be large enough to carry people, even if it looks tiny from...
Cause and Effect
Information Processing Approach
Parallel Processing
The Anchoring-and-Adjustment Heuristic

