Testing Differential Holistic Processing Within a Face: No Evidence of Asymmetry from the Complete Composite Task.

Gary C.-W Shyi,Chao-Chih Wang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01506

Abstract

The composite face task is one of the most popular research paradigms for measuring holistic processing of upright faces. The exact mechanism underlying holistic processing remains elusive and controversial, and some studies have suggested that holistic processing may not be evenly distributed, in that the top-half of a face might induce stronger holistic processing than its bottom-half counterpart. In two experiments, we further examined the possibility of asymmetric holistic processing. Prior to Experiment 1, we confirmed that perceptual discriminability was equated between top and bottom face halves; we found no differences in performance between top and bottom face halves when they were presented individually. Then, in Experiment 1, using the composite face task with the complete design to reduce response bias, we failed to obtain evidence that would support the notion of asymmetric holistic processing between top and bottom face halves. To further reduce performance variability and to remove lingering holistic effects observed in the misaligned condition in Experiment 1, we doubled the number of trials and increased misalignment between top and bottom face halves to make misalignment more salient in Experiment 2. Even with these additional manipulations, we were unable to find evidence indicative of asymmetric holistic processing. Taken together, these findings suggest that holistic processing is distributed homogenously within an upright face.

Highlights

Face recognition is a ubiquitous ability for humans and many investigators agree that at its core is holistic processing (Tanaka and Farah, 1993; McKone, 2010)
Using the composite face task, Young et al (1987) were among the first to demonstrate holistic processing of faces, which many regard as the hallmark of face processing and which is at the core of the debate between the expertise hypothesis and domain-specificity hypothesis of face processing (Kanwisher, 2000; Gauthier and Tarr, 2002; Gauthier et al, 2010; McKone, 2010)
Holistic Processing Within a Face face half), which implies that faces are processed holistically, rather than as parts that are combined

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Face recognition is a ubiquitous ability for humans and many investigators agree that at its core is holistic processing (Tanaka and Farah, 1993; McKone, 2010). We used the complete composite task (Gauthier and Bukach, 2007) to test whether there is differential holistic processing within a face Both Young et al (1987) and Hole (1994) only calculated the difference in performance between aligned and misaligned conditions (alignment effect) for trials where top halves were the same, while completely ignoring data from different trials (Robbins and McKone, 2007; Rossion, 2013). Prior to the composite task, we verified that top and bottom face halves were discriminable

Materials and Methods

Results and Discussion

CONCLUSION