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Related Concept Videos

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Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, is the inability to recognize faces. In severe cases, individuals with prosopagnosia may not recognize close family members, including parents and spouses, by their faces. For instance, someone with prosopagnosia might walk past their child in a crowd, only realizing their mistake upon noticing their child's distinctive backpack or favorite jacket. Prosopagnosia specifically impairs facial recognition, while the recognition of other objects or...
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Sep 19, 2025

Perceptual and Category Processing of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis' Dimension of Human Likeness: Some Methodological Issues
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The face size illusion is specific to human faces.

Stine Monsen1, Eamonn Walsh2,3, Denise Cadete1

  • 1School of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK.

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|June 6, 2025
PubMed
Summary

The face size illusion, where upright faces appear smaller than inverted ones, is specific to human faces. This effect was not observed with monkey or cat faces, suggesting a specialized human face perception mechanism.

Keywords:
Face perceptionillusioninversion effectsize perception

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Visual Perception

Background:

  • The human visual system possesses specialized mechanisms for upright face perception, leading to the face inversion effect.
  • A recently identified face size illusion shows upright faces perceived as smaller than identical inverted faces, an effect previously thought specific to faces.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether the face size illusion is specific to faces generally or exclusively to human faces.
  • To determine if non-human primate and feline faces elicit the same size perception bias as human faces.

Main Methods:

  • Participants judged the relative physical size of simultaneously presented upright and inverted faces.
  • The experiment utilized human, monkey, and cat faces across different blocks.

Main Results:

  • Human faces exhibited the expected illusion: upright faces perceived as smaller than inverted ones.
  • Monkey and cat faces did not show this illusion; instead, a bias in the opposite direction was observed.

Conclusions:

  • The face size illusion is highly specific, not only to faces but critically to human faces.
  • These findings underscore the specialized nature of human face processing in the visual system.