Facial Perception: Holistic or Feature-Analytic?

These experiments explored whether groups of facial features are perceived holistically or independently of one another. This was tested with the speeded classification task on inner (the eyebrows, eyes, nose, and lips) and outer (hair and chin) groups of features. When the inner features were separated, either by grouping the eyebrows or the lips as an outer feature, classifications by the inner group were affected by changes in the outer group although classifications by the outer group were unaffected by changes in the inner group. These results indicate that the outer features are perceived independently of the inner features and that the eyebrows, eyes, nose, and lips are perceived holistically. This implies that for facial reproduction, a change of an inner feature should be followed by the reconsideration of the other inner features in the presence of the changed feature.