Holistic Mechanisms of Face Recognition: Singular or Multiple?

Relevance. The perception of a person's face is holistic - we often don't even remember the eye color of a familiar person, but we easily recognize him in an old blurry photo. However, despite the half-century history of the study, the question of whether holistic processing is a single mechanism remains open, since the usual experimental paradigms do not allow us to directly separate the alleged processes of holistic face perception. The aim of the work was to compare the effect of various ways of violating the integrity of the face image on the recognition of memorized faces. Methods. An experiment was conducted with an intraindividual plan in a modified "part-whole" paradigm. 28 participants memorized a set of faces, after which they recognized those faces by their eyes, presented in three conditions: isolated; on a face, the remaining parts of which were blurred; on the whole face. Results. Significant differences in recognition efficiency were found between all three conditions of presentation: the eyes were recognized the worst when presented in isolation, and the best when presented with a full-fledged face. The presence of information about the relative spatial position of features (when blurring other facial features) significantly improved the result in comparison with isolated presentation, but did not achieve the conditions of a full-fledged image, which indicates in favor of a separate contribution to the perception of the face of the configuration information and the process of formation of a holistic representation. The limitations of the study was the small sample and the lack of verification of the result using other paradigms of the study of holistic processes of face perception. Conclusions. Holistic mechanisms of face recognition include at least two separate processes - the assessment of the face configuration and the formation of a holistic representation. Both of the processes requires further study, including brain localization. However, the distinction between these processes may be important in the diagnosis of pathology of facial perception (prosopagnosia).

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