Part-to-whole effects and configural processing in faces

In two experiments, the holistic face effect (Tanaka & Farah, 1993) was investigated by using a learning paradigm with faces which differed in terms of either componential (COMP) or configural (CONF) properties. When full faces had been learned, the expected finding of advantageous recognition of holistic presentations was replicated (Exp. 1). However, when only facial parts had been learned (Exp. 2), this effect was reduced and even reversed, indicating that wholistic superiority with both sorts of faces depends on holistic learning strategies (Leder & Carbon, in press, 2005). These results are in accord with the theory of encoding specificity (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). Moreover, the effects were found for COMP and CONF faces, supporting the hypothesis that holistic and configural processing are two different aspects of face recognition. Furthermore, when the faces were inverted at test inversion effects were not only found for CONF but also for COMP faces, indicating some kind of configural processing for faces that differ in terms of facial components.