Holistic processing has been shown to be a behavioral marker of face recognition and object recognition in experts. We tested Chinese literates who can read and write Chinese characters (Writers) and Chinese literates whose reading performance far exceeded their writing ability (Limited-writers). We found that Writers perceived Chinese characters less holistically than Limited-writers. In addit...

Holistic processing (HP) has been proposed to be a characteristic of right hemisphere (RH) processing. Here we test this claim using the divided visual field paradigm with Chinese character stimuli. HP is assessed through the composite paradigm, which is commonly used in perceptual expertise research. We found that in novice Chinese readers, a standard HP pattern emerged only in the left visual...

According to a classic view developed by Carey and Diamond (1977), young children process faces in a piecemeal fashion before adult-like holistic processing starts to emerge at the age of around 10 years. This is known as the encoding switch hypothesis. Since then, a growing body of studies have challenged the theory. This article will provide a critical appraisal of this literature, followed b...

There is conflicting evidence about whether individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate configural processing of faces. We examined two types of configural processing of unfamiliar faces in high-functioning adults with ASD: Holistic processing (processing a face as a gestalt percept) and processing of second-order relations (the spatial relations among facial features, e.g., dis...

Researchers have used several composite face paradigms to assess holistic processing of faces. In the selective attention paradigm, participants decide whether one face part (e.g., top) is the same as a previously seen face part. Their judgment is affected by whether the irrelevant part of the test face is the same as or different than the relevant part of the study face. This failure of select...