Civile Ciro, Elchlepp Heike, McLaren Rossy, Galang Carl Michael, Lavric Aureliu, McLaren Ipl
1 Washington Singer Laboratories, School of Psychology, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.
2 Department of Psychology Neuroscience & Behaviour (PNB), McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2018 Nov;71(11):2464-2476. doi: 10.1177/1747021817744455. Epub 2018 Jan 1.
The face inversion effect refers to a decrement in performance when we try to recognise familiar faces turned upside down (inverted), compared with familiar faces presented in their usual (upright) orientation. Recently, we have demonstrated that the inversion effect can also be found with checkerboards drawn from prototype-defined categories when the participants have been trained with these categories, suggesting that factors such as expertise and the relationships between stimulus features may be important determinants of this effect. We also demonstrated that the typical inversion effect on the N170 seen with faces is found with checkerboards, suggesting that modulation of the N170 is a marker for disruption in the use of configural information. In the present experiment, we first demonstrate that our scrambling technique greatly reduces the inversion effect in faces. Following this, we used Event-Related Potentials ( ERPs) recorded while participants performed an Old/New recognition study on normal and scrambled faces presented in both upright and inverted orientations to investigate the impact of scrambling on the N170. We obtained the standard robust inversion effect for normal faces: The N170 was both larger and delayed for normal inverted faces as compared with normal upright faces, whereas a significantly reduced inversion effect was recorded for scrambled faces. These results show that the inversion effect on the N170 is greater for normal compared with scrambled faces, and we interpret the smaller effect for scrambled faces as being due to the reduction in expertise for those faces consequent on scrambling.
面孔倒置效应是指当我们试图识别倒置（上下颠倒）的熟悉面孔时，与以正常（正立）方向呈现的熟悉面孔相比，表现会下降。最近，我们已经证明，当参与者接受了基于原型定义类别的棋盘格训练后，在这些棋盘格中也能发现倒置效应，这表明诸如专业知识以及刺激特征之间的关系等因素可能是这种效应的重要决定因素。我们还证明，在面孔上常见的对N170的典型倒置效应在棋盘格中也能发现，这表明N170的调制是配置信息使用中断的一个标志。在本实验中，我们首先证明我们的扰乱技术大大降低了面孔的倒置效应。在此之后，我们使用事件相关电位（ERP），在参与者对以正立和倒置方向呈现的正常面孔和扰乱面孔进行旧/新识别研究时进行记录，以研究扰乱对面孔N170的影响。我们得到了正常面孔的标准且显著的倒置效应：与正常正立面孔相比，正常倒置面孔的N170更大且延迟，而对于扰乱面孔，记录到的倒置效应显著降低。这些结果表明，与扰乱面孔相比，正常面孔对N170的倒置效应更大，我们将扰乱面孔较小的效应解释为由于扰乱导致对这些面孔的专业知识减少。
