The Man With an Upside-Down Head: Unraveling the Secrets of Human Face Perception

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When you spot a familiar face, you can usually identify it instantly. However, recognizing that same face becomes significantly more difficult when it's upside down. Researchers studying Claudio, a 42-year-old man with a head that is nearly 180 degrees rotated backward to sit between his shoulder bl

Researchers studying Claudio, a man with his head rotated back almost 180 degrees, suggest that people’s adeptness at processing upright faces results from both evolution and experience. Through various tests, including recognizing Thatcherized faces, Claudio showed more accuracy with inverted face detection, suggesting the role of both evolutionary and experiential factors in face recognition abilities.

Researchers have long known from earlier studies that our ability to process faces drops or even plummets when a face is rotated 180 degrees. But it had been hard to determine if the reason for that comes from evolutionary mechanisms that shaped our brains’ facial processing abilities gradually over time or simply because most of us primarily interact with people and see them with their face in an upright position.

To find out, the researchers tested Claudio’s face-detection and identity-matching abilities in 2015 and 2019. They also tested his recognition of Thatcherized faces, in which some of the features, such as the eyes and mouth, had been altered. Across all three types of tests, people with typical face perception are much better at these judgments when faces are upright than when they are inverted.

Duchaine was surprised to get a different result when Claudio saw Thatcherized faces. In that case, Claudio performed better when those manipulated faces appeared upright. While the researchers say they don’t why this happened, they suspect that the Thatcher effect arises from different visual mechanisms than facial detection and identity matching—and that those different mechanisms must have different developmental trajectories.

 

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