Abstract
Holistic processing is a hallmark of face perception. Three paradigms commonly used to measure holistic processing are the part-whole (PW), standard composite face (SCF), and complete composite face (CCF) tasks. In PW, observers show better recognition performance for a feature (e.g., eyes) when it is presented in a face than in isolation. Despite key design differences in SCF and CCF, both tasks show impaired recognition performance when a task-relevant face half (e.g., top) is aligned with a task-irrelevant face half (e.g., bottom) from a different face; the impairment is reduced for misaligned face halves. Nonetheless, conflicting findings on holistic processing have emerged across these tasks, and recent studies showed weak or no correlations in the holistic effects measured in these tasks. We investigated whether the two components of holistic processing, facilitation and interference, might distinguish the effects captured across the three tasks. Specifically, 1) PW may primarily reveal facilitation, 2) SCF may mainly reveal interference, and 3) facilitation and interference may be separated in CCF with a baseline of isolated face half (e.g., Richler et al., 2008), with facilitation as better performance for aligned-congruent than isolated trials, and interference as worse performance for aligned-incongruent trials than isolated trials. Participants (N=455) completed all three tasks online. As expected, the holistic effects were observed in all tasks. Although significant correlations were observed between SCF and CCF effects (r’s≥0.12), neither effect was correlated with the PW effect (r’s≤0.04). Critically, interference in CCF was significantly correlated with SCF (r’s≥.16) but not with PW (r’s≤0.07). Although facilitation was also observed in CCF, it was not significantly correlated with either PW (r’s≤0.09) or SCF (r’s≤0.05). These results suggest that PW, SCF, and CCF capture different aspects of holistic processing. We propose that clarifying influences of facilitation and interference is critical in understanding holistic face processing.