Eyes are central to face processing however their role in early face encoding as reflected by the N170 ERP
component is unclear. Using eye tracking to enforce fixation on specific facial features, we found that the N170
was larger for fixation on the eyes compared to fixation on the forehead, nasion, nose ormouth,which all yielded
similar amplitudes. This eye sensitivity was seen in both upright and inverted faces andwas lost in eyeless faces,
demonstrating it was due to the presence of eyes at fovea. Upright eyeless faces elicited largest N170 at nose
fixation. Importantly, the N170 face inversion effect (FIE) was strongly attenuated in eyeless faces when fixation
was on the eyes butwas less attenuated for nose fixation andwas normalwhen fixationwas on themouth. These
results suggest the impact of eye removal on the N170 FIE is a function of the angular distance between the
fixated feature and the eye location. We propose the Lateral Inhibition, Face Template and Eye Detector based
(LIFTED) model which accounts for all the present N170 results including the FIE and its interaction with eye
removal. Although eyes elicit the largest N170 response, reflecting the activity of an eye detector, the processing
of upright faces is holistic and entails an inhibitory mechanismfromneurons coding parafoveal information onto
neurons coding foveal information. The LIFTED model provides a neuronal account of holistic and featural