Bartlett and Searcy's recent account for the Thatcher illusion suggests that inversion impairs holistic facial information. This illusion is used to compare the effects of inverting and negating faces. Subjects made a speeded response to whether just the mouth and the eyes of a face have been inverted. Performance was found to be slower when faces were inverted rather than upright. Presenting faces in photographic negative also hindered performance implying that this transformation also disrupts holistic facial information.
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Lewis et al. (1997) studied this question.
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