FACIAL INVERSION EFFECTS - PARTS AND WHOLE RELATIONSHIP

''Facial inversion effects'' refers to the findings that recognition o f inverted faces is less accurate than recognition of upright faces. W e now report inversion effects for isolated facial features: forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, and chin, This shows that configurational informat ion extracted from a whole face (i.e., from spatial relationships amon g the facial features) is not necessary for obtaining the inversion ef fects. Other factors, such as ''upright-orientation,'' mental rotation , and feature saliency, account for the inversion effects both in a wh ole face and in its isolated features. We propose a simple formula tha t satisfactorily predicts the recognition of a whole face and the inve rsion effects for that face on the basis of its individual features.