Across a wide range of face perception tasks, observers show drastically worse performance when faces are oriented upside-down versus upright. However, the meaning of orientation must be established in relation to a particular frame of reference. In relation to which reference frame(s) does the face inversion effect occur? Here we describe a simple, novel method for investigating potentially in...

We examined whether the orientation of the face influences speech perception in face-to-face communication. Participants identified auditory syllables, visible syllables, and bimodal syllables presented in an expanded factorial design. The syllables were /ba/, /va/, /oa/, or /da/. The auditory syllables were taken from natural speech whereas the visible syllables were produced by computer anima...

The Poggendorff illusion has often been explained as purely an interaction between the parallels and the transversals. The present study demonstrates that additional spatial context exerts an influence on this illusion. In Experiment 1, we examined the effects of a surrounding tilted frame (complete and degraded versions) on collinearity adjustments in the upright and rotated Poggendorff figure...

There is ample behavioral evidence of diminished orientation towards faces as well as the presence of face perception impairments in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the underlying mechanisms of these deficits are still unclear. We used face-like object stimuli that have been shown to evoke pareidolia in typically developing (TD) individuals to test the effect of a global face-like configura...

Recent work demonstrates that human face identification is most efficient when based on horizontal, rather than vertical, image structure. Because it is unclear how this specialization for upright (compared to inverted) face processing emerges in the visual system, the present study aimed to systematically characterize the orientation sensitivity profile for face identification. With upright fa...

Effective navigation and locomotion depend critically on an observer's ability to judge direction of linear self-motion, i.e., heading. The vestibular cue to heading is the direction of inertial acceleration that accompanies transient linear movements. This cue is transduced by the otolith organs. The otoliths also respond to gravitational acceleration, so vestibular heading discrimination coul...

Detection of others' gaze direction is an essential tool in everyday communication. As the gaze direction is analyzed rapidly and automatically, we hardly notice how we are performing this task. Wollaston's illusion [Wollaston, W. H. (1824). On the apparent direction of eye in a portrait. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B, 114, 247-256] provides us the chance to...

Here we examine whether our impressive ability to perceive upright faces arises from evolved orientation-specific mechanisms, extensive experience with faces, or both factors. To do so, tested Claudio, a man congenital joint disorder causing his head be rotated back so that it is positioned between shoulder blades. As result, Claudio has seen more reversed in orientation own face than matched i...

The lateral interaction for molecular orientation rearrangement of adsorbates was investigated using high-resolution electron-energy-loss spectroscopy (HREELS). The adsorption configuration of CO on Pd(110) was identified, based on the observation of hindered rotational vibrations in the dipole-scattering spectra. With increasing coverage, the CO orientation switches from the upright configurat...

Phospholamban (PLB) is a 52 amino acid transmembrane protein found in the sarcoplasmic reticulum of cardiac myocytes, where it regulates the transport of calcium ions by SERCA (sarcoplasmic/endoplasmic reticulum Ca2+-ATPase). This work has shown that the cytoplasmic domain of PLB associates with phospholipid vesicles, possibly with the lipid polar head groups, and, in doing so, undergoes a tran...