Holistic processing—the tendency to perceive objects as indecomposable wholes—has long been viewed as a process specific to faces or objects of expertise. Although current theories differ in what causes holistic processing, they share a fundamental constraint for its generalization: Nonface objects cannot elicit facelike holistic processing in the absence of expertise. Contrary to this prevaili...

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We test 12 individuals with congenital prosopagnosia (CP), who replicate a common pattern of showing severe difficulty in recognising facial identity in conjunction with normal recognition of facial expressions (both basic and 'social'). Strength of holistic processing was examined using standard expression composite and identity composite tasks. Compared to age- and sex-matched controls, group...

Holistic, (global) processing refers to the integration of local stimulus features into a larger perceptual form with an interpretation independent of its parts. While global precedence is the norm for adults, infants’ perception depends greatly upon individual differences. Using a novel auditory AX-CPT (AX Continuous Performance Task) this study examined congruence between auditory and visual ...

People with dyslexia have difficulty learning to read and many lack fluent word recognition as adults. In a novel task that borrows elements of the 'word superiority' and 'word inversion' paradigms, we investigate whether holistic word recognition is impaired in dyslexia. In Experiment 1 students with dyslexia and controls judged the similarity of pairs of 6- and 7-letter words or pairs of word...

Holistic processing has been associated with perceptual expertise in different domains involving faces, cars, fingerprints, musical notes, English words, etc. Curiously Chinese characters are regarded as an exception, as indicated by reduced holistic processing found for experts with the Chinese writing system as compared with novices. We revisit the issue and examine one type of holistic proce...