What Mrs Thatcher taught me about face processing
Whitehead Lecture: Ben Pimlott Building Lecture Theatre, Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:00:00 GMTProfessor Nick Donnelly, University of Southampton
The Thatcher illusion is thought to demonstrate the processing of perceptual configural features in faces. The basis for this inference is the immediacy of the phenomenological experience of grotesqueness that emerges when the eyes and mouths are inverted in otherwise upright faces. I will report on three experiments that explore how Thatcher faces are discriminated from typical faces. The results of these experiments are inconsistent with perceptual configural processing of Thatcher (and typical) faces. I will go on to argue none of the commonly reported behavioural tests of configural face processing actually provide supporting evidence for the perceptual processing of configurations. I will finish by considering the implications for studies of both the development of face processing and face processing in atypical populations.BRIEF BIO: Nick Donnelly is currently head of the School of Psychology at the University of Southampton. He studied for his PhD at the University of Wales, Swansea, graduating in 1989. Since then he has worked at Birkbeck College, the University of Birmingham, the University of Kent at Canterbury before moving to Southampton in 1999. His research focuses on issues of configurality in visual processing and visual search.