In natural environments, stimuli often recur across time and space, requiring the visual system to remain sensitive to novelty while managing predictability. A central question in systems neuroscience...

In natural environments, stimuli often recur across time and space, requiring the visual system to remain sensitive to novelty while managing predictability. A central question in systems neuroscience...

AIP Sperimentale 2025Benvenute e benvenuti nella pagina ufficiale del XXXI Congresso dell'Associazione Italiana di Psicologia - Sezione Sperimentale, che si terrà a Torino presso il Campus Luigi Einau...

Neuropsychology's place in diagnosing dementia is still up for debate. With the advent of disease-modifying therapies, the optimisation of diagnostic pathways is increasingly urgent, particularly in ....

Understanding how the human brain generates, utilizes, and adapts to technology is one of our most urgent scientific questions today. Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience reveal a complex neur...

Objective Anosognosia for memory deficits is frequently observed in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Despite its relevance, this phenomenon is understudi...

Humans possess a unique capacity for technical reasoning - the ability to infer and manipulate the causal structure of the physical world. Although this faculty is central to technological innovation,...

How do we extract meaning and understand the action potential of everyday objects? In this eye-tracking study, we show that familiarity with tools modulates the temporal dynamics of their visual explo...

Fatigue is a debilitating symptom in Parkinson's disease (PD), significantly affecting quality of life. Despite its prevalence, the underlying neuroph…

When we observe an object, our visual system identifies its shape and integrates it with specific details to form a coherent representation. This coarse-to-fine approach involves rapid processing of low spatial frequency (LSF) content to generate a basic template, which aids the integration of the more detailed high spatial frequency (HSF) information. Here we explore with two experiments how the contribution of LSF and HSF integration extends to face processing. To do so, we leveraged the face inversion effect, whereby inverted faces are more difficult to recognize than upright ones. In Experiment 1, ten participants matched two familiar faces displayed in rapid succession (template and probe face, respectively). The template and the probe shared either the same SF (congruent) or had complementary SF (incongruent). In congruent conditions, HSF templates yielded better matching accuracy than LSF templates. However, in incongruent conditions, mapping LSF probes onto HSF templates was more effective, but only for upright faces. We propose that, depending on the task, holistic processing may be facilitated by detailed information. In Experiment 2, twelve participants performed the same task with both familiar and unfamiliar faces. While for familiar faces the effects were the same as Experiment 1, for unfamiliar faces the overall accuracy was better for congruent than incongruent conditions, and, crucially, it was independent of the template SF. Our results challenge the view that LSF content provides a foundational template for integrating HSF information, and instead suggest a flexible encoding of SF information, that depends on image contingencies. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

YouTube video by Giovanni Federico

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