Laguesse Renaud, Dormal Giulia, Biervoye Aurélie, Kuefner Dana, Rossion Bruno
Institut de Recherche en Sciences Psychologiques, Institut de Neurosciences, Université de Louvain, Belgium.
J Vis. 2012 Sep 26;12(10):14. doi: 10.1167/12.10.14.
The poorer recognition performance for inverted as compared to upright faces is one of the most well-known and robust behavioral effects observed in the field of face perception. Here we investigated whether extensive training at individualizing a large set of inverted faces in adulthood could significantly reduce this inversion effect for novel faces. This issue is important because inverted faces are as complex as upright faces but they are not visually experienced during development. Moreover, inverted faces violate the biological constraints, present at birth, for preferential looking (i.e., a larger number of elements in the top part than the bottom part of the stimulus). Eight adult observers were trained for 2 weeks (16 hr) to individualize 30 inverted face identities presented under different depth-rotated views. Following training, all participants showed a significant reduction of their inversion effect for novel face identities presented in a challenging four-alternatives delayed matching task. This reduction of the face inversion effect was observed in comparison to the magnitude of the same observers' effect before training, and to the magnitude of the face inversion effect of a group of untrained participants. These observations indicate that extensive training in adulthood can lead to a significant reduction of the inversion effect that generalizes to novel faces, suggesting a larger degree of flexibility of the adult face processing system than previously thought.
与正立面孔相比，倒置面孔的识别表现较差，这是面孔感知领域中最广为人知且稳固的行为效应之一。在此，我们研究了成年期对大量倒置面孔进行个体化的广泛训练是否能显著减少对新面孔的这种倒置效应。这个问题很重要，因为倒置面孔与正立面孔一样复杂，但在发育过程中它们没有视觉体验。此外，倒置面孔违反了出生时就存在的生物学限制，即优先注视（即刺激物顶部的元素数量多于底部）。八名成年观察者接受了为期两周（16小时）的训练，以个体化在不同深度旋转视图下呈现的30个倒置面孔身份。训练后，在具有挑战性的四选一延迟匹配任务中，所有参与者对新面孔身份的倒置效应都显著降低。与训练前相同观察者的效应大小以及一组未训练参与者的面孔倒置效应大小相比，观察到了这种面孔倒置效应的降低。这些观察结果表明，成年期的广泛训练可以导致倒置效应显著降低，并推广到新面孔，这表明成年面孔加工系统的灵活性程度比之前认为的要高。
