Recovery from adaptation to facial identity is larger for upright than inverted faces in the human occipito-temporal cortex.

Human faces look more similar to each other when they are presented upside-down, leading to an increase of error rates and response times during individual face discrimination tasks. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test the hypothesis that this perceived similarity leads to a lower recovery from identity adaptation for inverted faces than for upright faces in face-sensitive areas of the occipito-temporal cortex. Ten subjects were presented with blocks of upright and inverted faces, with the same face identity repeated consecutively in half of the blocks, and different facial identities repeated in the other blocks.