Recognition of familiar objects is impaired by contrast reversal

Previous research has shown that faces are difficult to recognize when viewed in reverse contrast (Galper, 1970). In a previous study, we demonstrated that the contrast reversal effect can also be found with a set of non-face novel objects (Peissig et al., 2003), and that the effect was significantly greater for faces and novel objects with nonuniform surface texture than those with uniform surface texture. Here, we tested observers in a within-category, same/different sequential-matching task using gray scale images of common objects. We found a significant contrast effect for these common objects, indicating that the contrast reversal effect is not specific to faces or face-like stimuli