Holistic Processing Happens at Later, Task-Specific Stages of Face Processing

We examined whether holistic processing, a hallmark of face perception, took place at an early stage of face processing shared by all facial judgments, or at later stages specific for processing different facial information such as identity, expression and gender. In Study 1, a composite paradigm was used where the two face halves could differ in identity, expression, or both. Participants' performance on recognizing the identity (or expression) from half of the face was influenced by incongruent identity (or expression) from the other half, but unaffected by incongruent expression (or identity) from the other half. This indicates that holistic processing of identity and expression are independent of each other. In Study 2, we found that the magnitude of holistic processing for identity and expression as measured by separate face composite tasks were not correlated across individuals. In Study 3, we also found no correlation between the magnitudes of holistic processing for identity and gender. The dissociation found between holistic processing of different facial information suggests that holistic processing does not originate from the general visual encoding required for all facial judgments. Instead it emerges later in processes devoted specifically to different facial judgments.