Organization: Critical for Holistic Processing

Abstract

Previous research has indicated that categorizing stimuli containing multi-dimensional information was better when the stimuli were schematic human faces than if they were either polygons or number matrices. It has also been shown that faces are perceived holistically, and that faces with organized inner features are detected more quickly than faces with unorganized inner features. This study used the speeded classification task and found that faces with organized inner features are perceived holistically whereas faces with unorganized inner features showed little evidence for holistic processing. These results suggest that information about organized faces is perceived very efficiently. The implications for using a face as a data display are discussed.