Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

What causes the face inversion effect?

M J Farah1, J W Tanaka, H M Drain

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 19104-6196, USA.

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance
|June 1, 1995
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Brain Activity Underlying Mental Imagery: Event-related Potentials During Mental Image Generation.

Journal of cognitive neuroscience·2013
Same author

Savings in relearning face-name associations as evidence for "covert recognition" in prosopagnosia.

Journal of cognitive neuroscience·2013
Same author

Visual Object Representation: Interpreting Neurophysiological Data within a Computational Framework.

Journal of cognitive neuroscience·2013
Same author

Mechanisms of spatial attention: the relation of macrostructure to microstructure in parietal neglect.

Journal of cognitive neuroscience·2013
Same author

Early commitment of neural substrates for face recognition.

Cognitive neuropsychology·2010
Same author

Prosopamnesia: a selective impairment in face learning.

Cognitive neuropsychology·2010
Same journal

Human thermal sensitivity drifts at extreme temperatures.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2026
Same journal

Dynamic competition between selective attention and spatial prediction during visual search.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2026
Same journal

Encapsulation of the visual perception of social events from semantic priming.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2026
Same journal

Biasmapping: Idiosyncratic covert search in the vicinity of fixation.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2026
Same journal

What are you still waiting for? Fricative recognition shows encapsulated processing and is partially predicted by secondary cue reliance.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2026
Same journal

Eye movements reveal that drivers can predict the location of hazards in dynamic road scenes but gaze and awareness are dissociable.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2026
See all related articles

The visual system struggles to recognize inverted faces due to holistic processing. This effect is reduced when faces are processed as separate parts, not a whole.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Visual Neuroscience

Background:

  • The human visual system exhibits a unique sensitivity to face perception.
  • Inverted faces are significantly harder to recognize than upright faces, a phenomenon known as the face inversion effect.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the hypothesis that the face inversion effect stems from holistic shape representations in visual processing.
  • To explore how manipulating the degree of part decomposition influences face recognition and inversion effects.

Main Methods:

  • Experiment 1: Used dot patterns with varying degrees of part decomposition (manipulated by color-based grouping and segregation) to test inversion susceptibility.
  • Experiment 2: Employed whole and part-isolated face stimuli, varying study conditions (whole vs. separate parts) to induce different processing strategies.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Confirmed that inversion susceptibility in non-face patterns correlates with their degree of part decomposition.
  • Demonstrated that the face inversion effect can be eliminated by encouraging participants to process faces based on their component parts.

Conclusions:

  • The face inversion effect is linked to the visual system's reliance on holistic representations for upright faces.
  • Facilitating part-based processing of faces mitigates the recognition difficulties associated with inversion.