Abstract
Turning a face upside-down disrupts our ability to accurately perceive changes in spacing and feature shape information, and has been suggested to disrupt configural/holistic processing. When a face engages in motion the shape of the features and spacing between them undergo continual variation. However, little is known about the effect that inversion has on this added level of configural change within a moving face or whether this added level of change impacts on the perception of other non-face stimuli in a similar way. The aim of the current experiment was to explore the effect of inversion on moving and static unfamiliar faces and two comparable classes of biological stimuli - human bodies and dogs - in a long-term memory recognition task. It was hypothesised that the added disruption of spacing and feature shape change due to motion would increase inversion effect sizes for moving (compared to static) faces and bodies, but not dogs. Results revealed significantly larger inversion effects in inverse efficiency (IE) for all moving (compared to static) stimulus types. For moving faces (and perhaps bodies) this increased delay in IE may come about as a result of increased difficulty in tracking configural and feature shape change in an upside-down face. However, this interpretation seems unlikely given that a similar increase in IE was also found between static and moving dogs and patterns in inversion effect size differences between stimulus types remained consistent in the static and moving groups. The findings suggest that face perception remains quantitatively similar to whole-body perception and quantitatively dissimilar to dog perception regardless of whether the stimuli are static or moving.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014