Evidence for Configural Processing in Crossmodal Face Matching
Poster Presentation

Sarah J Casey
Department of Psychology/TCIN, University of Dublin

Fiona N Newell
Department of Psychology/TCIN, University of Dublin

     Abstract ID Number: 48
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 16, 2005

Abstract
Visual researchers often cite configural face processing, and its disruption due to inversion, as evidence of a face-specific processing mechanism. Recently a haptic face inversion effect was demonstrated suggesting that the haptic system also relies more on the processing of configural information during the recognition of upright faces. Previously we reported that familiar and unfamiliar faces could be matched successfully across the visual and haptic modalities. Here we tested whether this crossmodal matching ability is facilitated more by a featural or configural information contained in the faces. In Experiment 1 participants had to match a haptic facemask to a successively presented visual face image. The visual stimuli were either intact, blurred, or scrambled faces. We found a cost in matching performance for facemasks matched to scrambled stimuli relative to that for both intact and blurred images. In Experiment 2 this effect was extended to a vision-to-touch crossmodal matching task. Our findings suggest that configural face information is encoded by both the visual and haptic modalities and that this information underpins more efficient face matching across the modalities.