Summary

A recent article in Acta Psychologica (“Picture-plane inversion leads to qualitative changes of face perception” by B. Rossion, 2008) criticized several aspects of an earlier paper of ours (Riesenhuber et al., “Face processing in humans is compatible with a simple shape-based model of vision”, Proc Biol Sci, 2004). We here address Rossion’s criticisms and correct some misunderstandings. To frame the discussion, we first review our previously presented computational model of face recognition in cortex (Jiang et al., “Evaluation of a shape-based model of human face discrimination using fMRI and behavioral techniques”, Neuron, 2006) that provides a concrete biologically plausible computational substrate for holistic coding, namely a neural representation learned for upright faces, in the spirit of the original simple-to-complex hierarchical model of vision by Hubel and Wiesel. We show that Rossion’s and others’ data support the model, and that there is actually a convergence of views on the mechanisms underlying face recognition, in particular regarding holistic processing.