s The upside-down swimming catfish (Synodontis nigriventris) has unique behavior, i.e., it frequently shows a stable upside-down posture during swimming and resting. To examine whether the unique postural control in S. nigriventris results from the characteristics of the vestibular organ, we observed the morphological aspects of the otolith and the orientation of sensory hair cells in the utric...

Our ability to recognise biological motion in point-light displays is reduced when the animation sequence is upside-down, taken as evidence that past experience about direction of gravity influences the perception of biological motion. We exposed newly hatched chicks, reared in darkness and thus in the absence of previous visual experience, to point-light animation sequences of a walking hen ei...

A new study reveals that bats use the inertia of their unusually heavy wings-rather than their aerodynamic properties-to help them perform acrobatic maneuvers like landing upside down to roost. Read the Research Article.

Faces are found generally to be perceived as thinner when viewed upside down. When a face is viewed upright, the internal features are thought to influence the perception of face shape. However, when inverted, it has been proposed that disruption to holistic processing means that these factors can no longer be used to judge the shape of a face. We show that it is not the case that an inverted f...