When Holistic Processing is Not Enough: Local Features Save the Day

Is configural information or featural information more important for facial identity recognition? How are the skills for processing these types of information developed? To investigate these issues, Mondloch et al. designed three sets of face images based on a single face, ”Jane”, to measure featural, configural, and contour processing. These stimuli were tested on human subjects of different ages in a same/different task. We test our model [Dailey et al., 2002] of face processing on these stimuli. We find that our model is overly holistic: It finds the configural differences the easiest to detect, while adult human subjects find featural changes the easiest to detect. We then introduce a representation of the important parts of the face (eyes and mouth) to our holistic model. We find that only a relatively small amount of holistic representation, compared to parts representations, is necessary to account for the data.