Perception of Faces, Objects, and Scenes Analytic and Holistic Processes

From a barrage of photons, we readily and effortlessly recognize the faces of our friends, and the familiar objects and scenes around us. However, these tasks cannot be simple for our visual systems--faces are all extremely similar as visual patterns, and objects look quite different when viewed from different viewpoints. How do our visual systems solve these problems? The contributors to this volume seek to answer this question by exploring how analytic and holistic processes contribute to our perception of faces, objects, and scenes. The role of parts and wholes in perception has been studied for a century, beginning with the debate between Structuralists, who championed the role of elements, and Gestalt psychologists, who argued that the whole was different from the sum of its parts. This is the first volume to focus on the current state of the debate on parts versus wholes as it exists in the field of visual perception by bringing together the views of the leading researchers. Too frequently, researchers work in only one domain, so they are unaware of the ways in which holistic and analytic processing are defined in different areas. The contributors to this volume ask what analytic and holistic processes are like; whether they contribute differently to the perception of faces, objects, and scenes; whether different cognitive and neural mechanisms code holistic and analytic information; whether a single, universal system can be sufficient for visual-information processing, and whether our subjective experience of holistic perception might be nothing more than a compelling illusion. The result is a snapshot of the current thinking on how the processing of wholes and parts contributes to our remarkable ability to recognize faces, objects, and scenes, and an illustration of the diverse conceptions of analytic and holistic processing that currently coexist, and the variety of approaches that have been brought to bear on the issues.

ContributorsIntroduction: Analytic and Holistic Processing--The View through Different Lenses, Mary A. Peterson and Gillian Rhodes1. What Are the Routes to Face Recognition?, James C. Bartlett, Jean H. Searcy, and Herv´e Abdi2. The Holistic Representation of Faces, James W. Tanaka and Martha J. Farah3. When Is a Face Not a Face? The Effects of Misorientation on Mechanisms of Face Perception, Janice E. Murray, Gillian Rhodes, and Maria Schuchinsky4. Isolating Holistic Processing in Faces (And Perhaps Objects), Elinor McKone, Paolo Martini, and Ken Nakayama5. Diagnostic Use of Scale Information for Componential and Holistic Recognition, Philippe G. Schyns and Fr´ed´eric Gosselin6. Image-Based Recognition of Biological Motion, Scenes, and Objects, Isabelle Bülthoff and Heinrich H. Bülthoff7. Visual Object Recognition: Can a Single Mechanism Suffice?, Michael J. Tarr8. The Complementary Properties of Holistic and Analytic Representations of Shape, John E. Hummel9. Relative Dominance of Holistic and Component Properties in the Perceptual Organization of Visual Objects, Ruth Kimchi10. Overlapping Partial Configurations in Object Memory: An Alternative Solution to Classic Problems in Perception and Recognition, Mary A. Peterson11. Neuropsychological Approaches to Perceptual Organization: Evidence from Visual Agnosia, Marlene Behrmann12. Scene Perception: What We Can Learn from Visual Integration and Change Detection, Daniel J. Simons, Stephen R. Mitroff, and Steven L. Franconeri13. Eye Movements, Visual Memory, and Scene Representation, John M. Henderson and Andrew HollingworthIndex