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Inversion Effects Reveal Dissociations In Facial Expression Of Emotion, Gender, And Object Processing, Pamela M. Pallett, Ming Meng

Dartmouth Scholarship

To distinguish between high-level visual processing mechanisms, the degree to which holistic processing is involved in facial identity, facial expression, and object perception is often examined through measuring inversion effects. However, participants may be biased by different experimental paradigms to use more or less holistic processing. Here we take a novel psychophysical approach to directly compare human face and object processing in the same experiment, with face processing broken into two categories: variant properties and invariant properties as they were tested using facial expressions of emotion and gender, respectively. Specifically, participants completed two different perceptual discrimination tasks. One involved making …