Holistic processing, the decoding of the global structure of a stimulus while the local parts are not explicitly represented, is a basic characteristic of object perception. The current study was aimed to test whether such a representation could be created even for objects that violate fundamental principles of spatial organization, namely impossible objects. Previous studies argued that these ...

Holistic processing was initially characterized a unique hallmark of face perception (e.g., Young et al., 1987) and later argued a domain-general marker of perceptual expertise (e.g., Gauthier et al., 1998). More recently, evidence for holistic processing - measured by interference from task-irrelevant parts - was obtained in novices, raising questions for its usefulness as a test of expertise....

Upright faces are thought to be processed holistically. However, the range of views within which holistic processing occurs is unknown. Recent research by McKone (2008) suggests that holistic processing occurs for all yaw-rotated face views (i.e., full-face through to profile). Here we examined whether holistic processing occurs for pitch, as well as yaw, rotated face views. In this face recogn...

Faces are an important and unique class of visual stimuli, and have been of interest to neuroscientists for many years. Faces are known to elicit certain characteristic behavioral markers, collectively labeled "holistic processing", while non-face objects are not processed holistically. However, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms. The main aim of this computational simulatio...

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 (E...

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 a...

With the renewed interest in the field of second language learning for the knowledge of collocating words, research findings in favour of holistic processing of formulaic language could support the idea that these language units facilitate efficient language processing. This study investigated the difference between processing of a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) of congruent col...

Holistic processing of faces can be measured as a failure of selective attention to one face-half under instructions to ignore the other face-half in a naming or same/different matching task. But is interference from the irrelevant half due to response interference rather than to holistic processing? Here, participants learned to name two faces "Fred" and two "Bob." At test, composites were cre...