Information-processing alternatives to holistic perception: identifying mechanisms of secondary-level holism within a categorization paradigm

Failure to selectively attend to a facial feature, in the part-to-whole paradigm, has been taken as evidence of holistic perception in a large body of face perception literature. In this article, we demonstrate that although failure of selective attention is a necessary property of holistic perception, its presence alone is not sufficient to conclude holistic processing has occurred. One must also consider the cognitive properties that are a natural part of information-processing systems, namely, mental architecture (serial, parallel), a stopping rule (self-terminating, exhaustive), and process dependency. We demonstrate that an analytic model (nonholistic) based on a parallel mental architecture and a self-terminating stopping rule can predict failure of selective attention. The new insights in our approach are based on the systems factorial technology, which provides a rigorous means of identifying the holistic–analytic distinction. Our main goal in the study was to compare potential changes in architecture when 2 second-order relational facial features are manipulated across different face contexts. Supported by simulation data, we suggest that the critical concept for modeling holistic perception is the interactive dependency between features. We argue that without conducting tests for architecture, stopping rule, and dependency, apparent holism could be confounded with analytic perception. This research adds to the list of converging operations for distinguishing between analytic forms and holistic forms of face perception