There’s a Time and a Face: The Time Course of Composite Face Processing

Abstract

Faces are considered a special class of holistically-processed object. The composite face task is a widelyused tool to infer holistic processing. In this task, recognition of 1 half of a composite face is shown to be hampered by interference from the other half of the face. Although this effect has been documented numerous times, when used in different paradigms, composite faces do not always exhibit effects consistent with holistic processing. The present study explored the cause of these discrepant findings by combining a composite face task with a signal-to-respond paradigm. The amount of time to make a face recognition decision was manipulated by introducing a response signal, and the re..