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Upside‐down faces: A review of the effect of inversion upon face recognition
Abstract
Several studies have found that face recognition is disproportionately impaired by stimulus inversion when compated to recognition of other classes of visual stimuli. This effect has been interpreted as evidence that face recognition benefits from a ‘special’ process which is not engaged by an inverted face. This paper reviews studies of the effect of inversion on face recognition in recognition memory tasks, matching tasks and upon cerebral hemisphere asymmetries. Evidence is drawn from developmental studies and from studies of brain‐injured and normal adult subjects. It is concluded that the evidence that inverted faces are processed differently from upright faces is far from compelling, and therefore the effect of inversion provides little or no evidence of a unique process in face recognition. The inversion effect is interpreted in terms of expertise in face processing and the highly homogeneous nature of faces as a stimulus class.
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Citations
Cited by
The distributed human neural system for face perception
Haxby, J. V., Hoffman, E. A., & Gobbini, M. I. (2000) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01482-0 · Cited by 4,891
Klin, A., Jones, W., Schultz, R., Volkmar, F., & Cohen, D. (2002) · Archives of General Psychiatry · doi:10.1001/archpsyc.59.9.809 · Cited by 2,120
Thirty years of investigating the own-race bias in memory for faces: a meta-analytic review
Meissner, C. A., & Brigham, J. C. (2001) · Psychology, Public Policy, and Law · doi:10.1037/1076-8971.7.1.3 · Cited by 1,204
Visual scanning of faces in autism
Pelphrey, K. A., Sasson, N. J., Reznick, J. S., Paul, G., Goldman, B. D., & Piven, J. (2002) · Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders · doi:10.1023/a:1016374617369 · Cited by 1,187
Schultz, R. T., Gauthier, I., Klin, A., Fulbright, R. K., Anderson, A. W., Volkmar, F., Skudlarski, P., Lacadie, C., Cohen, D. J., & Gore, J. C. (2000) · Archives of General Psychiatry · doi:10.1001/archpsyc.57.4.331 · Cited by 1,000
Metadata
- Authors
- Valentine, T.
- Venue
- British Journal of Psychology
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1988-11
- Volume
- 79
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 471-491
- ISSN
- 0007-1269 (ISSN-L)
- 2044-8295
- OpenAlex
- W2027926797
- Cited by
- 905
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 1.17
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Valentine, T. (1988). Upside‐down faces: A review of the effect of inversion upon face recognition. British Journal of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1988.tb02747.x
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
