title: The context congruency effect is face specific.
abstract: There is evidence that faces are processed by specialized and independent modules that treat them as global configurations, or wholes (Axelrod & Yovel, 2010; Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997). The holistic nature of face perception has been demonstrated with several experimental paradigms designed to examine whether facial parts interact, or are accessed independently. A recently introduced paradigm (Meinhardt-Injac, Persike, & Meinhardt, 2010) measures the strength of contextual interaction among internal and external facial features in congruent and incongruent target/no-target relationships. For this paradigm it is shown that the context congruency effect is indeed face specific: A strong and asymmetric contextual interaction of the inner and the outer stimulus regions exists for faces, but is absent for watches, which represent a non-facial object class with a comparable inner/outer object structure.
authors: Institute of Psychology, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Wallstr. 3, D-55122 Mainz, Germany. meinharb@uni-mainz.de
authors: Bozana
authors: B
authors: Meinhardt-Injac
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D014796:Visual Perception