Meanings, Mechanisms, and Measures of Holistic Processing

Few concepts are more central to the study of face recognition than holistic processing. Progress toward understanding holistic processing is challenging because the term “holistic” has many meanings, with different researchers addressing different mechanisms and favoring different measures. While in principle the use of different measures should provide converging evidence for a common theoretical construct, convergence has been slow to emerge. We explore why this is the case. One challenge is that “holistic processing” is often used to describe both a theoretical construct and a measured effect, which may not have a one-to-one mapping. Progress requires more than greater precision in terminology regarding different measures of holistic processing or different hypothesized mechanisms of holistic processing. Researchers also need to be explicit about what meaning of holistic processing they are investigating so that it is clear whether different researchers are describing the same phenomenon or not. Face recognition differs from object recognition, and not all meanings of holistic processing are equally suited to help us understand that important difference.