There is a little problem, I guess that is by confusion, with two indentation functions.

If we use this:
(setq whitespace-style (quote (indentation::space)))
in our configuration file on GNU Emacs (.emacs or init.el), we'll have the expected result for the next function:
 (setq whitespace-style (quote (indentation::tabs)))
The same happen but with the inverse case.

On other words, the function used has been exchanged with the other function.

We can to test it too with 
M-x whitespace-toggle-options RET ?
If we look the FACES table, and we had enabled just one aforementioned function, we'll see that the function enabled isn't the function that appear as enabled on the table (for example, if you had enabled indentation::space, it marks as enabled "toggle indentation TABs visualization" instead of the correct.