One hallmark of holistic face processing is an inability to selectively attend to 1 face part while ignoring information in another part. In 3 sequential matching experiments, the authors tested perceptual and decisional accounts of holistic processing by measuring congruency effects between cued and uncued composite face halves shown in spatially aligned or disjointed configurations. The autho...

Congenital prosopagnosia (CP) refers to a lifelong impairment in face processing despite normal visual and intellectual skills. Many studies have suggested that the key underlying deficit in CP is one of a failure to engage holistic processing. Moreover, there has been some suggestion that, in normal observers, there may be greater involvement of the right than left hemisphere in holistic proce...

The most essential ingredient of interpolation is its basis function. We have shown in previous papers that this basis need not be necessarily interpolating to achieve good results. On the contrary, several recent studies have confirmed that non-interpolating bases, such as B-splines and O-moms, perform best. This opens up a much wider choice of basis functions. In this paper, we give to the de...

It is widely agreed that the human face is processed differently from other objects. However there is a lack of consensus on what is meant by a wide array of terms used to describe this "special" face processing (e.g., holistic and configural) and the perceptually relevant information within a face (e.g., relational properties and configuration). This paper will review existing models of holist...

When complementary halves of different familiar faces are combined into a new face, there is interference in the identification of either half. This "composite face effect" has been taken as strong evidence that faces are processed holistically. Here, we demonstrate that this effect can persist when the two parts of a face are separated by up to 80 ms of visual noise, showing that the parts of ...

In this paper we examine the holistic processing of faces from an evolutionary perspective, clarifying what such an approach entails, and evaluating the extent to which the evidence currently available permits any strong conclusions. While it seems clear that the holistic processing of faces depends on mechanisms evolved to perform that task, our review of the comparative literature reveals tha...

The present study aimed to investigate whether human body forms--like human faces--undergo holistic processing. Evidence for holistic face processing comes from the face composite effect: two identical top halves of a face are perceived as being different if they are presented with different bottom parts. This effect disappears if both bottom halves are shifted laterally (misaligned) or if the ...

Using the Garner speeded classification task, Amishav and Kimchi (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17, 743-748, 2010) found that participants could selectively attend to face features: Classifying faces based on the shape of the eyes was not influenced by task-irrelevant variation in the shape of the mouth, and vice versa. This result contrasts with a large body of work using another selective at...

Face perception is widely believed to involve integration of facial features into a holistic perceptual unit, but the mechanisms underlying this integration are relatively unknown. We examined whether perceptual grouping cues influence a classic marker of holistic face perception, the "composite-face effect." Participants made same-different judgments about a cued part of sequentially presented...

In this paper, we investigate the question, “what are the best features for face identification?” Ullman et al. used mutual information as measurement of how good a feature is for a class [Ullman et al., 2002]. Their experiments suggested that features of intermediate complexity are best in tasks of face vs. non-face and cars vs. non-cars. We are interested in the tasks of face identification a...