Source: Laboratory of Jonathan Flombaum—Johns Hopkins University

In perception, it is often the case that the ability to recognize and interpret complex stimuli feels effortless but actually demands complicated and intensive processing. This is because processing is specialized and automated for certain types of very important stimuli. Among the best examples of this phenomenon is face processing. People do not try to detect and recognize faces. It just seems to happen. However, detecting faces and telling them apart from one another is actually a demanding computational task.

Human facial recognition abilities rely on specialized computations and dedicated brain networks. One simple demonstration of this is the inverted-face effect. Recognizing upside-down faces is far more difficult than recognizing them right-side up, but the same is not true for many other kinds of visual objects. The inverted-face effect is demonstrated in a variety of ways. This video shows an incidental encoding memory paradigm for investigating facial processing and the inverted-face effect.