Characterization of Featural, Configural, and Holistic Processing in the Structural Encoding of Faces

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Faces are one of the most important visual stimuli we encounter on a daily basis. They provide us with information about not only people's identities, but also how they are feeling, what they are looking at, their level of alertness, and so on. Although extracting all this information from a face seems effortless, it is in fact an incredibly complex task, and our understanding of how the brain accomplishes it is poor. This research is an attempt to give us a better understanding of one aspect of face processing; That is, we are seeking to elucidate how the visual system achieves the difficult task of recognizing individual faces. ***     Face recognition is such an important human capacity that is thought to involve a qualitatively different kind of visual processing than our perception of other visual objects. It is even thought to have a set of brain areas specifically devoted to it. The proposed research program investigates the structural encoding aspect of face perception, wherein individual face images are analyzed and compared to existing representations of faces in memory. In particular, we are seeking to better understand the differences between 3 aspects of the structural encoding of faces called featural, configural, and holistic processing. Although these three types of processing are thought to exist by most researchers, there is much that remains to be understood about them. For instance, what scales of visuospatial information do they rely on? What parts of the face are important to each? ***     This project is aimed at providing a greater understanding of the differences between the three face processing mechanisms. Our approach to doing this is multi-faceted, involving perceptual, psychophysical, and electrophysiological research techniques. The first aspect of the program will involve characterizing the spatial frequency requirements of the processing mechanisms. A second approach will investigate patterns of eye movements thought to be reflective of the different aspects of face processing. A third element of the program will be an attempt to characterize the processing types in terms of how their electrophysiological signatures (ERP components) are modulated by spatial frequency variations. The final aspect will involve directly comparing a variety of perceptual research paradigms that are thought to tap into one or the other type of processing to see how performance on these tasks correlate with one another. ***     Together, these findings have the potential to provide a more complete understanding of how the brain accomplishes face recognition. In particular, we may be able to provide a more formal characterization of the three processing types, which would bring an important advance to this field by clarifying some of the central concepts that it investigates.***     In addition to the scientific advances it will bring, the proposed research program will enable the training of over a dozen student researchers.**