Sierro, G. 1 , Mohr, C. 1 , Hadjikhani, N. 2, 3 & Brandner, C. 1
1 Laboratory for Experimental Study of Behavior. Université de Lausanne. Lausanne, Switzerland.
2 Brain Mind Institute. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Lausanne, Switzerland.
3 Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. Harvard Medical School. Boston, USA
Processing of social stimuli seems impaired in conditions such as autism and schizophrenia. In autism, a bias for local information has been described, while apophenia might explain faulty interpretations in schizophrenia. To test such impaired social processing, the use of face stimuli has been popular. Based on previous findings, we suggest that such processing biases should be established with face-like stimuli lying between faces and objects stimuli. To assess face-like stimuli processing, we here evaluated in 48 healthy participants whether configural processing performance for face-like stimuli would lie between the one for faces and objects in a recognition task with inversion. After a first encoding block, participants made old-new judgments on upright or inverted “old” and “new” stimuli, randomly intermixed in a second block. Accuracy and reaction time analyses yielded the commonly observed face inversion effect. Despite no inversion effect for face-like stimuli, overall performance was lying between the ones for faces and objects. Also, reaction times were comparable for inverted faces and both inverted and upright face-like stimuli. These results indicate that face-like stimuli might be a promising stimulus type to assess local and configural processing biases, in particular when autistic and schizophrenic pathological or personality dimensions are considered.