LOCAL AND RELATIONAL ASPECTS OF FACE DISTINCTIVENESS

Distinctiveness contributes strongly to the recognition and rejection of faces in memory tasks. In four experiments we examine the role play ed by local and relational information in the distinctiveness of uprig ht and inverted faces. In all experiments subjects sam one of three ve rsions of a face: original faces, which had been rated as average in d istinctiveness in a previous study (Hancock, Burton, & Bruce, 1996), a more distinctive version in which local features had been changed (D- loral), and a more distinctive version in which relational features ha d been changed (D-rel). An increase in distinctiveness was found for D -local and D-rel faces in Experiment 1 (complete faces) and 3 and 4 (f ace internals only) when the faces had to be rated in upright presenta tion, but the distinctiveness of the D-rel faces was reduced much more than that of the D-local versions when the ratings were given to the faces presented upside-down (Experiments 1 and 3). Recognition perform ance showed a similar pattern: presented upright, both D-local and D-r el revealed higher performance compared to the originals, but in upsid e-down presentation the D-local versions showed a much stronger distin ctiveness advantage. When only internal features of faces were used (E xperiments 3 and 4), the D-rel faces lost their advantage over the Ori ginal versions in inverted presentation. The results suggest that at l east two dimensions of facial information contribute to a face's appar ent distinctiveness, bur that these sources of information are differe ntially affected by turning the face upside-down. These findings are i n accordance with a face processing model in which face inversion effe cts occur because a specific type of information processing is disrupt ed, rather than because of a general disruption of performance.