The time course of face matching for featural and relational image manipulations

It was found recently that horizontal and vertical relationships of facial features are differently vulnerable to inversion (Goffaux & Rossion, 2007). When faces are upside down manipulations of vertical relations are difficult to detect, while only moderate performance deficits are found for manipulations of horizontal relations, or when features differ. We replicate the findings of Goffaux and Rossion, and record the temporal courses of face matching performance and the effects of inversion. For vertical relations and featural changes inversion effects arise immediately, starting with the first 50 ms of processing. For horizontal relations inversion effects are absent at brief timings, but arise later, after about 200 ms. The final magnitudes of inversion effects are different in all three conditions, reaching 23.4% for vertical displacement, 10.7% for feature replacement, and 5.8% for horizontal displacement. Our results underline the special status of horizontal in contrast to vertical feature relations, and indicate that local and global configural information is handled in parallel by specific routines, as proposed recently (Senunkova & Barton, 2008).

Research Highlights
► Early inversion effects for vertical, late ones for horizontal relational processing.
► Featural changes are not processed locally.
► Coexistence of global and local processing.