Are there qualitative differences between face processing in photographic positive and negative?

The question whether face recognition in photographic negative relies more on external features and pictorial cues than in photographic positive was s tudied in five experiments. Recognition of whole faces as well as both exte rnal and internal features of the faces was compared in experiments 1 and 2 . The conditions in which views of faces between learning and test were eit her identical (hence providing maximum pictorial cues) or different (hence reducing such cues) were compared in experiments 3, 4, and 5. The results s howed that recognition of internal features in two-tone and multi-tone imag es suffered more from use of photographic negatives than recognition of ext ernal features. Testing with both multi-tone and two-tone images revealed t hat the deficit caused by view changes between learning and lest was no mor e severe with negatives than with positives. Finally, removing external fea tures made recognition of different views equally more difficult for positi ves and negatives. Overall, these results point to a qualitative rather tha n quantitative difference between processing face images in photographic po sitive and negative.