ABSTRACT
The most important source of information that people use to identify someone in daily life is the face. In marked contrast to the cases of mistaken identity described above, during the 1970s considerable attention was given to experiments appearing to suggest that memory for once-glimpsed unfamiliar faces was remarkably accurate. Faces are also extremely susceptible to contrast reversal in photographic negation. Even though a negative image of a face portrays the same spatial layout of luminance contrasts, the appearance of the face is rendered dramatically different. In some respects the effects of negation on face recognition are “disproportionate” compared with recognition of other kinds of objects. Farmers are able to distinguish between their different individual cows or sheep. Importantly, at the level of individual recognition, the mapping between visual form and semantics is arbitrary. The precise meaning of the term “configure” or “holistic” processing has been unclear in much of the literature.
