Activation of face expertise and the inversion effect

ABSTRACT—We used a contextual priming paradigm to examine top-down influences on the face-inversion effect. Adult participants were primed with either faces or Chi-nese characters and then tested on ambiguous figures that could be perceived as either faces or Chinese characters, dependent on the priming condition. The ambiguous figures differed from one another in their configural information, which is crucial for processing faces but not Chinese char-acters. The inversion effect was observed in the face-prim-ing condition, but not in the character-priming condition. The present results provide the first direct evidence that top-down activation of the face-processing expertise system plays a crucial role in the face-inversion effect. The recognition of faces is disproportionally impaired, relative to nonface stimuli (e.g., houses, cars), when they are seen inverted rather than upright (Yin, 1969). This phenomenon is referred to as the face-inversion effect. Conclusive evidence has shown that this effect is primarily due to disruption of the processing of configural, rather than featural, information in faces (e.g.