Evidence For Holistic Processing Research Articles

The development of holistic face processing: An evaluation with the complete design of the composite task

The composite paradigm is widely used to quantify holistic processing (HP) of faces: participants perform a sequential same-different task on one half (e.g., top) of a test-face relative to the corresponding half of a study-face. There is, however, debate regarding the appropriate design in this task. In the partial design, the irrelevant halves (e.g., bottom) of test- and study-faces are always different; an alignment effect indexes HP. In the complete design, besides alignment, congruency between the irrelevant and critical halves of the test-face is manipulated regarding the same/different response status of the study-face. The HP indexed in the complete design does not confound congruency and alignment and has good construct and convergent validities. De Heering, Houthuys, & Rossion (2007) argued that HP is mature as early as 4-year-olds but employed the partial design. Here we revisit this claim, testing four groups of 4- to 9/10 year-old children and two groups of adults. We found evidence of HP only from 6-year-olds on when considering the complete design, whereas significant alignment effects were found in the index adopted in the partial design already in 4-year-olds but which we demonstrate that reflects other factors besides HP, including response bias associated with congruency.

Do we always see the forest before the trees? The global precedence effect in English native speakers with Roman and Thai Navon letters

Event Abstract Back to Event Do we always see the forest before the trees? The global precedence effect in English native speakers with Roman and Thai Navon letters Rebecca Watts1* and Heather Winskel2 1 Southern Cross University, Psychology, School of Health and Human Sciences 2 Department of Psychological Science, School of Health and Human Sciences, Southern Cross University, Australia Aim: Reading acquisition is a prerequisite of functioning in modern day existence as we live in a data driven society. Paying attention to the bigger picture is an evolutionary survival response achieved via a global processing mechanism in human cognition. This level of attention can be problematic when children are learning to read or are dyslexic, as reading requires local and analytic processing to focus on the letters that make up a word. The study investigated if priming moderates global and local processing in English speakers with Roman and Thai Navon compound letters. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether global and local priming could moderate English speaker’s processing of Roman and Thai Navon letters. The Global Precedence Effect (GPE) is evidence of holistic processing, characterized by a global advantage (faster responses at the global level) and asymmetric congruence (global to local interference). Based on previous research, it was predicted that there would be a global precedence effect for the face priming condition but not the letter priming condition. Method: Forty-six native English speakers living in Australia (18 males, 28 females) were subjected to a priming task, either a face sorting (global priming condition) or letter identification (local priming condition) task, prior to participating in the Navon experiment. Results: The results revealed a robust GPE in both priming conditions revealing that the native English speakers were processing Roman and Thai Navon letters in a more holistic manner. Conclusion: The priming conditions did not have an influence on local/global processing of the Navon letters. In fact, a robust GPE was found for both familiar Roman letters and unfamiliar Thai letters. Even though the letters were presented in central vision and were in a font size typical for reading, a GPE still emerged for the Roman letters. Keywords: holistic processing, Global precedence effect, Roman letters, Thai letters, Navon compound letters, reading, global advantage Conference: 15th Annual Psychology Honours Research Conference , Coffs Harbour, Australia, 4 Oct - 5 Oct, 2018. Presentation Type: Research Topic: Abstract for 15th Annual Psychology Honours Research Conference Citation: Watts R and Winskel H (2019). Do we always see the forest before the trees? The global precedence effect in English native speakers with Roman and Thai Navon letters. Front. Psychol. Conference Abstract: 15th Annual Psychology Honours Research Conference . doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2018.74.00037 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 18 Sep 2018; Published Online: 27 Sep 2019. * Correspondence: Ms. Rebecca Watts, Southern Cross University, Psychology, School of Health and Human Sciences, Coffs Harbour, r.watts.14@student.scu.edu.au Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Rebecca Watts Heather Winskel Google Rebecca Watts Heather Winskel Google Scholar Rebecca Watts Heather Winskel PubMed Rebecca Watts Heather Winskel Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Holistic processing of fingerprints by expert forensic examiners

Holistic processing is often characterized as a process by which objects are perceived as a whole rather than a compilation of individual features. This mechanism may play an important role in the development of perceptual expertise because it allows for rapid integration across image regions. The present work explores whether holistic processing is present in latent fingerprint examiners, who compare fingerprints collected from crime scenes against a set of standards taken from a suspect. We adapted a composite task widely used in the face recognition and perceptual expertise literatures, in which participants were asked to match only a particular half of a fingerprint with a previous image while ignoring the other half. We tested both experts and novices, using both upright and inverted fingerprints. For upright fingerprints, we found weak evidence for holistic processing, but with no differences between experts and novices with respect to holistic processing. For inverted fingerprints, we found stronger evidence of holistic processing, with weak evidence for differences between experts and novices. These relatively weak holistic processing effects contrast with robust evidence for holistic processing with faces and with objects in other domains of perceptual expertise. The data constrain models of holistic processing by demonstrating that latent fingerprint experts and novices may not substantively differ in terms of the amount of holistic processing and that inverted stimuli actually produced more evidence for holistic processing than upright stimuli. Important differences between the present fingerprint stimuli and those in the literature include the lack of verbal labels for experts and the absence of strong vertical asymmetries, both of which might contribute to stronger holistic processing signatures in other stimulus domains.

Holistic integration of gaze cues in visual face and body perception: Evidence from the composite design.

A considerable amount of research on identity recognition and emotion identification with the composite design points to the holistic processing of these aspects in faces and bodies. In this paradigm, the interference from a nonattended face half on the perception of the attended half is taken as evidence for holistic processing (i.e., a composite effect). Far less research, however, has been dedicated to the concept of gaze. Nonetheless, gaze perception is a substantial component of face and body perception, and holds critical information for everyday communicative interactions. Furthermore, the ability of human observers to detect direct versus averted eye gaze is effortless, perhaps similar to identity perception and emotion recognition. However, the hypothesis of holistic perception of eye gaze has never been tested directly. Research on gaze perception with the composite design could facilitate further systematic comparison with other aspects of face and body perception that have been investigated using the composite design (i.e., identity and emotion). In the present research, a composite design was administered to assess holistic processing of gaze cues in faces (Experiment 1) and bodies (Experiment 2). Results confirmed that eye and head orientation (Experiment 1A) and head and body orientation (Experiment 2A) are integrated in a holistic manner. However, the composite effect was not completely disrupted by inversion (Experiments 1B and 2B), a finding that will be discussed together with implications for future research.

Comparing the role of selective and divided attention in the composite face effect: Insights from Attention Operating Characteristic (AOC) plots and cross-contingency correlations

Composite faces combine the top half of one face with the bottom half of another to create a compelling illusion of a new face. Evidence for holistic processing with composite faces comes primarily from a matching procedure in a selective attention task. In the present study, a dual-task approach has been employed to study whether composite faces reflect genuine holistic (i.e., fusion of parts) or non-holistic processing strategies (i.e., switching, resource sharing). This has been accomplished by applying the Attention Operation Characteristic methodology (AOC, Sperling & Melchner, 1978a, 1978b) and cross-contingency correlations (Bonnel & Prinzmetal, 1998) to composite faces. Overall, the results converged on the following conclusions: (a) observers can voluntarily allocate differential amounts of attention to the top and bottom parts in both spatially aligned and misaligned composite faces, (b) the interaction between composite face halves is due to attentional limitations, not due to switching or fusion strategies, and (c) the processing of aligned and misaligned composite faces is quantitatively and qualitatively similar. Taken together, these results challenge the holistic interpretation of the composite face illusion.

Developmental changes in analytic and holistic processes in face perception.

Although infants demonstrate sensitivity to some kinds of perceptual information in faces, many face capacities continue to develop throughout childhood. One debate is the degree to which children perceive faces analytically versus holistically and how these processes undergo developmental change. In the present study, school-aged children and adults performed a perceptual matching task with upright and inverted face and house pairs that varied in similarity of featural or 2nd order configural information. Holistic processing was operationalized as the degree of serial processing when discriminating faces and houses [i.e., increased reaction time (RT), as more features or spacing relations were shared between stimuli]. Analytical processing was operationalized as the degree of parallel processing (or no change in RT as a function of greater similarity of features or spatial relations). Adults showed the most evidence for holistic processing (most strongly for 2nd order faces) and holistic processing was weaker for inverted faces and houses. Younger children (6–8 years), in contrast, showed analytical processing across all experimental manipulations. Older children (9–11 years) showed an intermediate pattern with a trend toward holistic processing of 2nd order faces like adults, but parallel processing in other experimental conditions like younger children. These findings indicate that holistic face representations emerge around 10 years of age. In adults both 2nd order and featural information are incorporated into holistic representations, whereas older children only incorporate 2nd order information. Holistic processing was not evident in younger children. Hence, the development of holistic face representations relies on 2nd order processing initially then incorporates featural information by adulthood.

Face gender recognition in developmental prosopagnosia: Evidence for holistic processing and use of configural information

Face identification deficits in developmental prosopagnosics (DPs) have been thought to be due to general difficulties with processing configural face information and integrating configural and parts information into a coherent whole (holistic processing). Gender recognition provides a further opportunity to more fully examine this issue as this ability may be intact in DPs and it has been shown to depend on processing configural information and holistic processing in neurotypical individuals. In the present study we first determined that, indeed, gender discrimination performance was similar in DPs and controls. Second, we found that inversion and scrambling (which we propose measures holistic processing and sensitivity to configural information, respectively) produced comparable deficits in DPs and controls, suggesting that both groups use holistic processing and configural information to recognize gender. This indicates that holistic processing and using configural face information are not general impairments in DP and may be more specific to face identity.

Evidence for holistic processing of facial age

A composite face, produced by pairing the top and bottom halves from two different faces, produces a strong percept of a “new” face: It is difficult to identify either half in isolation. Three experiments examined whether a similar “composite face effect” (CFE) occurs with age judgements. Composites contained halves from faces of different ages. Participants tried to judge the age of the top half, ignoring the bottom. Experiment 1 found that age estimates for the composites’ top halves were biased towards the bottom halves’ chronological ages. Inverting the stimuli attenuated this effect but did not eliminate it entirely. The CFE for age perception is not based on skin texture information, since it persists when texture is eliminated by blurring or random noise (Experiments 2 and 3). Methodological differences preclude too detailed a comparison with other CFEs, but possibly the CFEs for age, recognition, and expression perception are all based on a common initial “holistic” encoding phase in face processing.

Inferring social attributes from different face regions: Evidence for holistic processing

Two experiments investigated the role that different face regions play in a variety of social judgements that are commonly made from facial appearance (sex, age, distinctiveness, attractiveness, approachability, trustworthiness, and intelligence). These judgements lie along a continuum from those with a clear physical basis and high consequent accuracy (sex, age) to judgements that can achieve a degree of consensus between observers despite having little known validity (intelligence, trustworthiness). Results from Experiment 1 indicated that the face's internal features (eyes, nose, and mouth) provide information that is more useful for social inferences than the external features (hair, face shape, ears, and chin), especially when judging traits such as approachability and trustworthiness. Experiment 2 investigated how judgement agreement was affected when the upper head, eye, nose, or mouth regions were presented in isolation or when these regions were obscured. A different pattern of results emerged for different characteristics, indicating that different types of facial information are used in the various judgements. Moreover, the informativeness of a particular region/feature depends on whether it is presented alone or in the context of the whole face. These findings provide evidence for the importance of holistic processing in making social attributions from facial appearance.

Behavioral and ERP measures of holistic face processing in a composite task

Holistic processing of faces is characterized by encoding of the face as a single stimulus. This study employed a composite face task to examine whether holistic processing varies when attention is restricted to the top as compared to the bottom half of the face, and whether evidence of holistic processing would be observed in event-related potentials. Analyses of behavioral data showed that spatial misalignment of the face halves disrupted holistic processing and enhanced detection of repeated attended halves. Effects of misalignment on the N170, VPP and N250 ERP components resembled effects of face inversion. Attention to the top half of the face was associated with faster P1, N170, VPP, and P2 latencies than attending to the bottom, suggesting automatic processing of the eye region. Further, N170 latency effects suggested that structural encoding of the face is facilitated during holistic processing. N250 latency effects reflected task difficulty. Finally, an overall right hemispheric asymmetry was most pronounced when holistic face processing was greatest. Results are discussed in light of recent proposals that holistic face processing is a subtype of configural face processing.

Organization: Critical for Holistic Processing

Previous research has indicated that categorizing stimuli containing multi-dimensional information was better when the stimuli were schematic human faces than if they were either polygons or number matrices. It has also been shown that faces are perceived holistically, and that faces with organized inner features are detected more quickly than faces with unorganized inner features. This study used the speeded classification task and found that faces with organized inner features are perceived holistically whereas faces with unorganized inner features showed little evidence for holistic processing. These results suggest that information about organized faces is perceived very efficiently. The implications for using a face as a data display are discussed.