Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The following studies investigated the perceptual processes that are the basis of the face inversion effect (FIE). We evaluated the effects of disrupting holistic information conveyed by the face contour/outline. In Experiment 1 (n=144) we blurred the contour of the faces and using an old/new recognition task we found that a robust inversion effect similar to that for normal faces remains for these new no-contour faces. However, a significant reduction in overall performance was found for no-contour vs normal faces. In Experiment 2 (n=74) instead of blurring we inserted a novel face contour to replace the normal one and found the same pattern of results as in Experiment 1. Our results suggest that the holistic information provided by the face contour does not on its own influence the FIE, however it plays a role in face recognition more generally.