The mental representations of faces and houses: Issues concerning parts and wholes

Donnelly, Nick and Davidoff, Jules (1999) The mental representations of faces and houses: Issues concerning parts and wholes. Visual Cognition, 6 (3-4), 319-344. (doi:10.1080/135062899395000).

Record type: Article

Abstract

We explore the integration of facial features and house parts to form holistic representations of complete objects. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3, we test for evidence of the holistic representation of houses and faces. We do so by testing for a complete over part probe advantage (CPA) in 2AFC recognition and matching tasks. We present evidence consistent with holistic features being represented for both types of stimuli. In Experiments 4 and 5, we examine further the effect with faces. Experiment 4 shows that facial features used in the matching task contribute differentially to CPAs across varying probe delays but with a similar pattern to that found in the recognition task (Experiment 1). Experiment 5 shows that CPAs are mandatory and cannot be removed by precueing with the probe type or the name of the feature to be probed.

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