Second-order facial features are processed analytically in composite faces

Abstract

In contrast to claims of holistic processing, upright aligned composite face morphs were recently shown to be processed in the same manner as inverted or misaligned composite face morphs (Cheng et al. 2018. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 44, 833–862). In the present paper, we replicate that work, using a set of schematic faces which vary second-order features (e.g., lip height and eye separation) in the top and bottom halves of the schematic face. We find that the present stimuli show the hallmarks of holistic processing in a complete composite face task, but differ from composite face morphs in that the best fitting MDS metric is more commensurate with a..