The effect of scrambling upright and inverted faces on the N170
Civile, C; Elchlepp, H; McLaren, RP; et al.Galang, CM; Lavric, A; McLaren, IPL
Date: 1 January 2018
Article
Journal
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Publisher DOI
Abstract
The face inversion effect refers to a decrement in performance when we try to recognise
familiar faces turned upside down (inverted), compared to familiar faces presented in their usual
(upright) orientation. Recently, we have demonstrated that the inversion effect can also be found
with checkerboards drawn from prototype-defined ...
The face inversion effect refers to a decrement in performance when we try to recognise
familiar faces turned upside down (inverted), compared to familiar faces presented in their usual
(upright) orientation. Recently, we have demonstrated that the inversion effect can also be found
with checkerboards drawn from prototype-defined categories when the participants have been
trained with these categories, suggesting that factors such as expertise and the relationships
between stimulus features, may be important determinants of this effect. We also demonstrated
that the typical inversion effect on the N170 seen with faces is found with checkerboards,
suggesting that modulation of the N170 is a marker for disruption in the use of configural
information. In the present experiment, we first demonstrate that our scrambling technique
greatly reduces the inversion effect in faces. Following this, we used Event-Related Potentials
(ERPs) recorded while participants performed an Old/New recognition study on normal and
scrambled faces presented in both upright and inverted orientations to investigate the impact of
scrambling on the N170. We obtained the standard robust inversion effect for normal faces: The
N170 was both larger and delayed for normal inverted faces as compared to normal upright
faces, whereas a significantly reduced inversion effect was recorded for scrambled faces. These
results show that the inversion effect on the N170 is greater for normal compared to scrambled
faces, and we interpret the smaller effect for scrambled faces as being due to the reduction in
expertise for those faces consequent on scrambling
Psychology - old structure
Collections of Former Colleges
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