Upside-down faces break holistic face recognition

Correct: B — Faces rely on configural/holistic processing that is disrupted by inversion

Yin (1969) discovered that inverting a face severely disrupts recognition while inverting houses, airplanes, or stick figures hurts much less. Tanaka & Farah (1993) sharpened this with the 'parts-and-wholes' paradigm, showing that participants identify a feature (e.g., a nose) far better when shown in the whole face than alone — the holistic advantage. Inversion eliminates this advantage. The current consensus is that upright faces engage configural/holistic processing — encoding the spatial relations between features as a unit — while inverted faces collapse to slower, feature-by-feature analysis. The disproportionate inversion cost is a hallmark signature of face-specific processing.