Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2009 Oct;16(5):778-97.
doi: 10.3758/PBR.16.5.778.

Why does picture-plane inversion sometimes dissociate perception of features and spacing in faces, and sometimes not? Toward a new theory of holistic processing

Elinor McKone  1 , Galit Yovel
Affiliations
Review

Why does picture-plane inversion sometimes dissociate perception of features and spacing in faces, and sometimes not? Toward a new theory of holistic processing

Elinor McKone et al. Psychon Bull Rev. 2009 Oct.

Abstract

Classically, it has been presumed that picture-plane inversion primarily reduces sensitivity to spacing/configural information in faces (distance between location of the major features) and has little effect on sensitivity to local feature information (e.g., eye shape or color). Here, we review 22 published studies relevant to this claim. Data show that the feature inversion effect varied substantially across studies as a function of the following factors: whether the feature change was shape only or included color/brightness, the number of faces in the stimulus set, and whether the feature was in facial context. For shape-only changes in facial context, feature inversion effects were as large as typical spacing inversion effects. Small feature inversion effects occurred only when a task could be efficiently solved by visual-processing areas outside whole-face coding. The results argue that holistic/configural processing for upright faces integrates exact feature shape and spacing between blobs. We describe two plausible approaches to this process.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Psychol Sci. 2006 Nov;17(11):930-4 - PubMed
    1. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2001 Jun;27(3):573-99 - PubMed
    1. Br J Psychol. 2001 Aug;92 Part 3:527-549 - PubMed
    1. Psychol Sci. 2003 Nov;14(6):618-22 - PubMed
    1. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 1996 Aug;22(4):904-15 - PubMed

Publication types

-