Abstract
Previous study (Wang et al., 2019) showed that upper- and lower-half face might be differently involved in human face holistic processing. In this current study, we replicated and extended the finding above. In experiment 1, we used the partial designed composite-face task to test the two ways of holistic processing: the upper-to-lower and the lower-to-upper composite. Participants were asked to judge whether same or not a study face and a test face’s upper-halves (or lower-halves) were after the two faces were presented successively. Results showed that the composite-face effect was stronger when the participants focused at the upper-half face relative to the lower-half face. In experiment 2, we investigated whether the range of holistic face processing changes when participants fixated at eye (in upper half face) or mouth (in lower half face). Using the perceptual field paradigm, we present a fusion face and then its original faces (a “central face” which was same with the fusion face in the eye or mouth and a “peripheral face” which was same with the fusion face in area outside the eye or mouth). Participants were asked to judge which was more similar with the fusion face. The more “peripheral face” was selected, the larger is the perceptual field size, which refers to the holistic processing range). Results showed that: (1) the perceptual field size was larger when participants fixated at the eyes than when they fixated at the mouth; (2) face inversion made perceptual field size small when either an eye or the mouth was fixated at. The findings suggested that the range of holistic face processing depends on the face area people focus on and the upper-half (e.g., eyes or an eye area) plays a different role from that of the lower-half (mouth area) of a face.