title: The perception of a face is no more than the sum of its parts.
abstract: When you see a person's face, how do you go about combining his or her facial features to make a decision about who that person is? Most current theories of face perception assert that the ability to recognize a human face is not simply the result of an independent analysis of individual features, but instead involves a holistic coding of the relationships among features. This coding is thought to enhance people's ability to recognize a face beyond what would be expected if each feature were shown in isolation. In the study reported here, we explicitly tested this idea by comparing human performance on facial-feature integration with that of an optimal Bayesian integrator. Contrary to the predictions of most current notions of face perception, our findings showed that human observers integrate facial features in a manner that is no better than would be predicted by their ability to use each individual feature when shown in isolation. That is, a face is perceived no better than the sum of its individual parts.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. jgold@indiana.edu
authors.forename: Jason M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Gold
authors.forename: Patrick J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Mundy
authors.forename: Bosco S
authors.initials: BS
authors.lastname: Tjan
mesh_terms: D001499:Bayes Theorem; D005145:Face; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D014796:Visual Perception