Abstract
Humans perceive faces holistically rather than as a set of separate features. Previous work demonstrates that some individuals are better at this holistic type of processing than others. Here, we show that there are unique individual differences in holistic processing of specific Mooney faces. We operationalized the increased difficulty of recognizing a face when inverted compared to upright as a measure of the degree to which individual Mooney faces were processed holistically by individual observers. Our results show that Mooney faces vary considerably in the extent to which they tap into holistic processing; some Mooney faces require holistic processing more than others. Importantly, there is little between-subject agreement about which faces are processed holistically; specific faces that are processed holistically by one observer are not by other observers. Essentially, what counts as holistic for one person is unique to that particular observer. Interestingly, we found that the per-face, per-observer differences in face discrimination only occurred for harder Mooney faces that required relatively more holistic processing. These findings suggest that holistic processing of hard Mooney faces depends on a particular observer’s experience whereas processing of easier, cartoon-like Mooney faces can proceed universally for everyone. Future work using Mooney faces in perception research should take these stimulus-specific individual differences into account to best isolate holistic processing.
Highlights
Humans perceive faces holistically rather than as a set of separate features (Sergent, 1984), and it is our ability to perceive faces as a whole that makes humans experts in face processing (Farah et al, 1998; Maurer et al, 2002)
We found that individual Mooney faces varied significantly in the magnitude of their inversion effect (Figure 4B) and these differences reflected changes in performance in both upright and inverted conditions (Figure 4A)
Our results reveal consistent per-subject individual differences in the extent of holistic processing of Mooney faces and stable per-face differences in the extent to which subjects process Mooney faces
Summary
Humans perceive faces holistically rather than as a set of separate features (Sergent, 1984), and it is our ability to perceive faces as a whole that makes humans experts in face processing (Farah et al, 1998; Maurer et al, 2002). One of the strongest pieces of evidence for holistic perception of faces is the inversion effect (Yin, 1969); holistic processing breaks down with inverted faces (Sergent, 1984; Farah et al, 1995; Rossion, 2008). This results in reduced performance (lower accuracies and longer reaction times) when identifying inverted faces compared to upright faces (Yin, 1969; McKone, 2004; Busey and Vanderkolk, 2005), but there is no such drop in accuracy for inverted single features (McKone, 2004). Because the inversion effect is stronger for Mooney faces than for gray-scale faces (McKone, 2004), they are often treated as a more efficient means of isolating holistic face processing
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