Inversion has been shown to disrupt face recognition, but relatively few studies have looked at the processes involved in the recognition of faces seen at intermediate angles of rotation. Here we address this issue by looking at the processing of rotated faces in a recognition memory task thought to encourage holistic processing, and in the matching of Thatcherised faces, a task which is seen as an indicator of configural processing. When faces were equally rotated at learning and test, we found no evidence of holistic processing. When the task was to recognise differently oriented faces, however, performance declined as an approximately linear function of the difference in orientation between the learning and test faces, suggesting that participants may be mentally rotating faces prior to recognition. Chapter 4 considered the effects of rotation on a same-different matching task thought to encourage configural processing. When the task required the matching of local configural information, the effect of rotation was approximately equal for normal and Thatcherised faces, but Thatcherisation disproportionately disrupted global configural information. The effect of rotation on these forms of information when face pairs contained identical images of the same person, and in an identity-matching task, was also explored. Chapter 6 looks at the effects of inversion on the detection of configural and featural changes to faces in a visual search task. Similar effects of inversion and search strategies were observed for both types of change at both angles of orientation, suggesting that face processing mechanisms do not extract configural at the expense of featural information from faces in this task. The implications of these findings for theories of face processing and the nature of the relationship between rotation and face processing are discussed, and the extent to which the mental rotation hypothesis can account for these findings is also considered.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:583882 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Edmonds, Andrew J. |
| Publisher | Cardiff University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://orca.cf.ac.uk/55669/ |
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