Prolonged exposure to upright and inverted female and male faces produces opposite effects on subsequent judgments of the sex of faces depending on their orientation. We show that the magnitude of this orientation-contingent gender aftereffect can be predicted from simple aftereffects induced separately at the same orientations. The contingent aftereffect can also be induced in faces tilted 90 ...

We determined the relative effectiveness of different areas of the visual field in determining the perceptual upright. The perceptual upright was measured using the character 'p', the identity of which depended on its perceived orientation (the Oriented Character Recognition Test). The visual field was divided into left and right, upper and lower, and central and peripheral halves, with differe...

Familiarity has been suggested to be crucial for recognizing objects instantly without conscious awareness. To investigate, researchers have employed continuous flash suppression (CFS), a phenomenon that suppresses stimulus presented one eye period by rapidly flickering images the other. Prior research discovered noticeable stimuli like faces and upright broke became perceivable faster. However...

Different scenes contain varying cues to the direction of gravity. Do scenes with stronger cues differentially affect the ability of a scene to influence the direction of the Subjective Visual Vertical (SVV) and the Perceptual Upright (PU)? Using indoor, outdoor, natural and man-made scenes we asked participants to judge the orientation of pictures (Scene Upright: SU), viewed through a circular...

In order to tap the electrophysiological correlates of the perceptual and structural encoding stages of face processing, we investigated how inversion and familiarity affect the face-specific event-related potentials (ERPs) components. ERPs were recorded while participants performed a familiarity judgment task with upright and inverted photographs of famous and unknown faces. The early P100 com...

Our ability to recognize faces despite their similarity as visual patterns depends on high-level face-coding mechanisms that are strongly tuned to upright faces. If face aftereffects reflect adaptation of these mechanisms, as widely assumed, then they should be sensitive to face orientation. Previous studies have not supported this hypothesis, but have generally used a figural aftereffect parad...

A choice experiment is reported in which all pairs and triples of faces from a set of eight moderately attractive faces were presented, both upright and upside down, to 103 subjects. In each orientation, the subjects had to select the face that appeared more (pairs) or most (triples) attractive to them. For each orientation, the preference probabilities that arose from the pair and triple compa...

Faces and bodies share a great number of semantic attributes, such as gender, emotional expressiveness, and identity. Recent studies demonstrate that bodies can activate and modulate face perception. However, the nature of the face representation that is activated by bodies remains unknown. In particular, face and body representations have previously been shown to have a degree of orientation s...

In two experiments on very young children's response to the orientation of pictures and objects, 18-, 24- and 30-month-old children showed no preference for upright pictures over inverted ones. More importantly, we found that children in all three age groups were equally accurate and equally fast at identifying depicted objects regardless of orientation. These studies further established that y...