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Abstract:
Abstract: Face recognition is disproportionately impaired by
stimulus in adults. The configural relations between face features
may be the aspect of the face that is sensitive to vertical
orientation. Inversion effects can extend to other 'objects of
expert identification' such as dogs, whose shape, when recognised
by dog-experts , may be processed in this way. We compared upright
and inverted face recognition for human, monkey and sheep faces in
a group of primatologists, presumed to be expert at identifying
individual monkeys and monkey species, and in a nonexpert group. A
forced-choice matching task was used. It was predicted that
primatologists would show similar inversion effects for human and
monkey faces, while for non-monkey-experts human faces should show
significantly greater inversion effects. However, this was not
found. Instead, both human and monkey faces showed inversion
effects when viewed by nonexperts, while experts showed no
inversion effect for monkey faces and a greater inversion effect
for human faces than the nonexperts. It appears that a general
'primate-template', sensitive to inversion may underly nonexpert
performance, while monkey-experts have differentiated templates for
the different species. For the primatologists we tested, the
'monkey ' template may not utilise orientation specific configural
information.
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