The speed of holistic face processing

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The face of a familiar friend or colleague is recognized instantaneously without conscious effort or forethought. Although face recognition occurs quickly, little is known about the exact timing and the underlying cognitive operations and brain mechanisms that mediate fast recognition. My proposed research will introduce a novel and powerful technique to test the "how" and "when" of face recognition. We assume that rapid face recognition requires holistic processing in which a face is recognized as a whole face stimulus rather than recognition of its individual parts. An untested question in the face recognition literature is the speed at which holistic face processing occurs. In a preliminary test of rapid holistic processing (RHP) I conducted with a postdoctoral trainee, a face was flashed on the screen for 17 to 500 ms, followed by a white-noise mask. The key finding was that the eyes were better recognized in the whole face than in isolation when presented for the shortest duration of 17ms (Tanaka & Xu, 2018). Although our results suggest that holistic face recognition occurs very quickly, more stringent psychophysical tests of rapid face recognition are warranted to identify the threshold of RHP; that is, the precise exposure duration at which the whole face advantage emerges. Over the next five years, my research group will first assess the RHP threshold across converging psychophysical paradigms with an ultra-high speed 240 Hz display monitor, capable of presentation rates of 4 ms. After determining the RHP threshold, we will move on to examine the generalizability and limits of RHP. We will attempt to disrupt RHP for faces by inverting the face stimulus or scrambling its internal features. We will also test whether RHP extends to the perception of facial emotion and non-face objects (i.e., houses). Building on these experiments, we will examine the effects of perceptual experience and learning by investigating the RHP across the lifespan and in real-world and laboratory-trained experts. In related work, we will isolate the brain dynamics of rapid holistic recognition of face identity and emotion by using a frequency tagging method in electroencephalography (EEG) where individual face parts (eye, nose, mouth) will be shown at different frequency rates. By focusing on the temporal dynamics of holistic processing, our research will open up exciting, and as yet, unexplored avenues of research in face and object recognition. The experiments will yield important conceptual insights that will deepen our understanding of cognitive and neural-based theories involving the speed of face recognition. The work will significantly advance the field and lead to new measures for assessing face recognition in healthy adults and in people who experience deficits in their face recognition abilities, such as individuals with autism, schizophrenia and dementia.