Latinus Marianne, Taylor Margot J
Centre de Recherche Cerveau & Cognition-UMR, Faculté de Médecine Rangueil, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2005 Aug;17(8):1316-27. doi: 10.1162/0898929055002490.
The specialness of faces is seen in the face inversion effect, which disrupts the configural, but not the analytic, processing of faces. Mooney faces, which are processed holistically, allowed us to determine the contribution of holistic processing to the face inversion effect. As inverted Mooney faces are difficult to recognize as faces, we also included an intermediary training period for Mooney face recognition for half of the subjects. Early face-sensitive ERPs (N170 and P1) and P2 were measured. Behavioral data showed an increase in correct responses to inverted and upright Mooney faces after the learning phase for the experimental group. No effects were seen on P1. N170 latency did not vary with stimulus type before the intermediary phase, however, N170 amplitude was consistently larger for upright than inverted Mooney faces. After the intermediary exercise, N170 was delayed for inverted compared to upright Mooney faces. In contrast, for both groups of subjects P2 amplitude was larger for nonface stimuli, and P2 amplitude decreased after the intermediate task only for the subjects trained to recognize Mooney faces. As the usual inversion effect seen with photographic faces (delayed and larger N170) was not seen with Mooney faces, these data suggest that this effect on N170 is due to the recruitment of analytic processing. P2 reflected learning and a deeper processing of the stimuli that were not identifiable as faces.
面孔的特殊性体现在面孔倒置效应中，该效应会干扰面孔的整体加工，但不会干扰其分析加工。整体加工的莫尼面孔使我们能够确定整体加工对面孔倒置效应的影响。由于倒置的莫尼面孔很难被识别为面孔，我们还对一半的受试者进行了莫尼面孔识别的中间训练期。测量了早期对面孔敏感的事件相关电位（N170和P1）以及P2。行为数据显示，实验组在学习阶段后，对倒置和正立莫尼面孔的正确反应有所增加。P1没有受到影响。在中间阶段之前，N170潜伏期不随刺激类型而变化，然而，正立莫尼面孔的N170波幅始终比倒置的大。经过中间训练后，与正立莫尼面孔相比，倒置莫尼面孔的N170潜伏期延迟。相比之下，对于两组受试者，非面孔刺激的P2波幅更大，并且只有在经过识别莫尼面孔训练的受试者中，中间任务后P2波幅才会降低。由于莫尼面孔没有出现与照片面孔常见的倒置效应（N170延迟且波幅更大），这些数据表明对N170的这种影响是由于分析加工的参与。P2反映了学习以及对无法识别为面孔的刺激的更深入加工。
