The “Parts and Wholes” of Face Recognition: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

It has been claimed that faces are recognized as a “whole” rather than the recognition of individual parts. In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1993, Martha Farah and I attempted to operationalize the holistic claim using the part/whole task. In this task, participants studied a face and then their memory presented in isolation and in the whole face. Consistent with the holistic view, recognition of the part was superior when tested in the whole-face condition compared to when it was tested in isolation. The “whole face” or holistic advantage was not found for faces that were inverted, or scrambled, nor for non-face objects suggesting that holistic encoding was specific to normal, intact faces. In this paper, we reflect on the part/whole paradigm and how it has contributed to our understanding of what it means to recognize a face as a “whole” stimulus. We describe the value of part/whole task for developing theories of holistic and non-holistic recognition of faces and objects. We discuss the research that has probed the neural substrates of holistic processing in healthy adults and people with prosopagnosia and autism. Finally, we examine how experience shapes holistic face recognition in children and recognition of own- and other-race faces in adults. The goal of this article is to summarize the research on the part/whole task and speculate on how it has informed our understanding of holistic face processing.

Spatio-temporal dynamics of face perception

“…Behaviorally, we excel at distinguishing these different sources of information, and can easily identify a familiar person just from their face despite changes in expression or viewpoint. Indeed, the processing of faces has been suggested to be 'special' (Richler & Gauthier, 2014), and faces have been proposed to be processed more holistically than other visual stimuli (Shen & Palmeri, 2015;Tanaka & Simonyi, 2016; but see also Gold, Mundy, & Tjan, 2012).…”

Expertise with unfamiliar objects is flexible to changes in task but not changes in class

“…This effect is commonly cited as evidence of non-analytic, holistic or configural processing, whereby the images are recognized as a whole, by gleaning the relational or covariant visual structure among constitute features, rather than part-by-part or by a general perceptual process [23]. The opposite appears to be the case, however, with unfamiliar face matching examiners, suggesting they may rely less on configural processing than in domains where the objects or categories are familiar.…”

No evidence that alcohol intoxication impairs judgments of learning in face recognition

“…Previous work examined the effects of alcohol intoxication on the accuracy of retrospective confidence judgments in face recognition (e.g., Flowe et al, ; Kneller & Harvey, ; Yuille & Tollestrup, ), and one study found that intoxication impaired the accuracy of prospective JOLs for word pairs (Nelson et al, ). However, it cannot be assumed that such results would translate to prospective JOLs in face recognition, due to differences between memory for faces and words (e.g., Tanaka & Simonyi, ), and in the cues that affect JOLs versus retrospective confidence (e.g., Rhodes, ).…”

“…These results provide some evidence that alcohol might impair metacognitive judgments made soon after acquiring new memorial information. However, given the differences in processing of faces versus word pairs (e.g., Maurer, Le Grand, & Mondloch, ; Tanaka & Simonyi, ), it cannot be assumed that the effects of alcohol on JOLs found by Nelson et al () will translate to a face recognition task.…”