Illustration of the procedure of the present study.

<p>Only the Chinese characters are shown in this figure. Faces and Chinese characters were presented in separate blocks. Participants were instructed to respond to the targets (stimuli with a red or green rectangle frame, 11.76% of total trials) by pressing one key for a red and another key for a green rectangle. There were different types of stimulus blocks for faces and Chinese characters: upright blocks (the upper 2 rows) with long (1150–1450 ms, mean 1300 ms) or short (500–800 ms, mean 650 ms) ISI, inverted blocks (not shown in this figure) with long or short ISI, and alternated blocks (the lowest rows) with short ISI. The contrasts between the upper 2 rows were the “adaptation-by-rate” effects, and the contrasts between the lower 2 rows were the “adaptation-by-orientation” effects for upright stimuli, respectively. The same contrasts were also performed for inverted faces and characters (not shown in this figure).