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Abstract
Background: Holistic processing is defined as the perceptual integration of facial features, and plays an important role in face recognition. While researchers recognize the crucial role played by holistic processing in face perception, a complete delineation of the underlying mechanisms is impending. Very few studies have examined the effects of perceptual discrimination and spatial perception on holistic processing. Hence, the present study aimed to examine the influence of perceptual discrimination and spatial perception on face recognition.Methods: We conducted two experiments by manipulating the perceptual discriminability of the target (the top-half faces) and non-target face (the bottom-half faces) parts in the composite-face task and examined how perceptual discriminability may affect holistic processing of faces.Results: The results of Experiment 1 illustrated that holistic processing was modulated by the perceptual discriminability of the face. Furthermore, differential patterns of perceptual discriminability with the target and non-target parts suggested that different mechanisms may be responsible for the influence of target and non-target parts on face perception. The results of Experiment 2 illustrated that holistic processing was modulated by spatial distance between two faces, implicating that feature-by-feature strategy might decrease the magnitude of holistic processing.Conclusion: The results of the present study suggest that holistic processing may lead to augmented perception effect exaggerating the differences between the two faces and may also be affected by the feature-by-feature strategy.
Highlights
Face recognition is the ability to recognize familiar and unfamiliar human faces (Gauthier et al, 2010)
Our findings suggest that the controversies about the expertise hypothesis and the domain-specificity hypothesis must be re-evaluated because many studies did not control the perceptual discriminability of the stimuli (Carey and Diamond, 1994; Gauthier and Tarr, 2002; Robbins and McKone, 2007)
Our findings demonstrated that perceptual discriminability and spatial distance affect the holistic processing of faces directly
Summary
Face recognition is the ability to recognize familiar and unfamiliar human faces (Gauthier et al, 2010). In the past, Galton (1879) was possibly the first to suggest that face recognition was attained through the integration of facial features called holistic processing (Young et al, 1987). Succeeding the findings of Galton, there have been a number of studies supporting the notion of holistic processing (Young et al, 1987; Gauthier et al, 2010; McKone, 2010). Holistic processing is defined as the perceptual integration of facial features, and plays an important role in face recognition. While researchers recognize the crucial role played by holistic processing in face perception, a complete delineation of the underlying mechanisms is impending. Very few studies have examined the effects of perceptual discrimination and spatial perception on holistic processing. The present study aimed to examine the influence of perceptual discrimination and spatial perception on face recognition
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