Van Belle Goedele, De Graef Peter, Verfaillie Karl, Rossion Bruno, Lefèvre Philippe
CESAME & Institute of Neuroscience (IoNS), Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
J Vis. 2010 May 1;10(5):10. doi: 10.1167/10.5.10.
Human observers are experts at face recognition, yet a simple 180 degrees rotation of a face photograph decreases recognition performance substantially. A full understanding of this phenomenon-which is believed to be important for clarifying the nature of our expertise in face recognition-is still waiting. According to a long-standing and influential hypothesis, an inverted face cannot be perceived as holistically as an upright face and has to be analyzed local feature by local feature. Here, we tested this holistic perception hypothesis of the face inversion effect by means of a gaze-contingent stimulus presentation. When observers' perception was restricted to one fixated feature at a time by a gaze-contingent window, performance in an individual face matching task was almost unaffected by inversion. However, when a mask covered the fixated feature, preventing the use of local information at high resolution, the decrement of performance with inversion was even larger than in a normal-full view-condition. These observations provide evidence that the face inversion effect is caused by an inability to perceive the individual face as a whole rather than as a collection of specific features and thus support the view that observers' expertise at upright face recognition is due to the ability to perceive an individual face holistically.
人类观察者是人脸识别方面的专家，但面部照片简单旋转180度就会大幅降低识别性能。对于这一现象的全面理解——人们认为这对于阐明我们在人脸识别方面的专业技能本质很重要——仍有待探索。根据一个长期且有影响力的假设，倒置的面部无法像正立的面部那样被整体感知，而必须逐个局部特征地进行分析。在此，我们通过注视点相关的刺激呈现方式来检验面部倒置效应的这种整体感知假设。当通过注视点相关窗口每次将观察者的感知限制在一个注视特征上时，个体面部匹配任务的表现几乎不受倒置的影响。然而，当一个遮罩覆盖住注视特征，阻止以高分辨率使用局部信息时，倒置导致的性能下降甚至比正常全视图条件下还要大。这些观察结果提供了证据，表明面部倒置效应是由于无法将个体面部作为一个整体而非特定特征的集合来感知，从而支持了这样一种观点，即观察者在正立面部识别方面的专业技能源于能够整体感知个体面部的能力。
