Holistic Processing and Right Hemisphere Lateralization Do Not Always Go Together—Evidence from Computational Modeling

Studies on face recognition have suggested a relationship between holistic processing and right hemisphere (RH) lateralization. Thus, it has long been assumed that holistic processing is a property of RH processing. Nevertheless, recent studies showed reduced holistic processing and increased RH lateralization in Chinese character recognition expertise, suggesting that these two effects may be separate processes. Through computational modeling, in which we implement a theory of hemispheric asymmetry in perception that posits a low spatial frequency bias in the RH and a high spatial frequency bias in the left hemisphere (i.e. the Double Filtering by Frequency Theory, Ivry & Robertson, 1998), here we show that when the recognition task relies purely on featural information, holistic processing increases whereas RH lateralization decreases with increasing stimulus similarity, and there is a negative correlation between them. In contrast, when the recognition task relies purely on configural information, although holistic processing also increases whereas RH lateralization decreases with increasing stimulus similarity, there is no correlation between them. This result suggests that holistic processing and RH lateralization are separate processes that can be influenced differentially by task requirements.