Upright and inverted faces, and housefronts, in the two visual fields: A right and a Left hemisphere contribution

Abstract

In the first experiment, schematic outline drawings of upright and inverted faces and house fronts, where nontargets differed from targets by all three features, were flashed to left and right visual fields (LVF and RVF, respectively), in a discriminatory manual RT task. An equally strong LVF superiority occurred for each type of stimulus. There was no evidence in this task of a specialist processor for upright faces in the right hemisphere over and above the latter's general mediation of complex visuospatial stimuli. The second experiment confirmed that a right hemisphere superiority is not an inevitable concommitant of processing face material. Upright faces which previously had been shown to generate a RVF superiority in the context of difficult, analytic, single-feature discriminations, and a LVF superiority in the context of an easy holistic match-mismatch, were combined into a single sequence to determine whether the perceived nature of the total task would change the magnitude or direction of asymmetries normally occurring for a given type of stimulus when presented in isolation. The hypothesis was confirmed.

The findings were discussed in the context of clinical evidence for a dissociation between deficits in general visuospatial processing, and one or more specific types of face processing, all of which are known to be largely represented in the right hemisphere.