Expertise accounts for inversion effect

Abstract

A contextual priming paradigm was used to investigate the influence of processing of configural/featural information and activation of expertise upon inversion effect. 32 participants were divided into Faces group (Faces priming vs. English letters priming) and Chinese characters group (Chinese characters priming vs. English letters priming). Pair matching tasks were performed in the processing of configural and featural information respectively. Participants were primed with either Face/Chinese characters or Combination of English letters, and then tested on ambiguous, undefined, but identical stimuli that could be interpreted as either faces/Chinese characters or combination of English letters in terms of different contextual priming. The presence of inversion effect in Faces and Chinese characters priming (only in the processing of configural information) and the absence of such effect in the English letters priming demonstrated that inversion effect should be attributed not only to the processing of configural information but also to the specific top-down priming mechanism. However, inversion effect of Chinese characters priming was distinct from that induced in the faces priming, and such effect of inversion in Chinese characters couldn’t be explained by the recruitment of face-specific mechanisms, which justified the explanation of inversion effect by expertise.