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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 27, 2026

Holistic Facial Composite Creation and Subsequent Video Line-up Eyewitness Identification Paradigm

Holistic Facial Composite Creation and Subsequent Video Line-up Eyewitness Identification Paradigm

Published on: December 24, 2015

Hemisphere-dependent holistic processing of familiar faces.

Meike Ramon¹, Bruno Rossion

¹Institute of Psychology (IPSY) & Institute of Neuroscience (IoNS), Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. meike.ramon@uclouvain.be

Brain and Cognition

|November 22, 2011

Summary

The right hemisphere may lead early holistic face processing, but later identification relies on unified representations. The composite face effect

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Neuroscience
Psychology
Visual Perception

Background:

The composite face effect is a key measure of holistic face processing.
Previous research has not definitively established hemispheric dominance for this effect.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether the composite face effect is more pronounced for stimuli presented to the right versus the left hemisphere.
To explore the role of hemispheric lateralization in early stages of holistic face processing and later face identification.

Main Methods:

Two behavioral experiments using lateralized stimulus presentation.
Experiment 1: Verbal identification task assessing the composite face effect.
Experiment 2: Matching task assessing the composite face effect with same top parts.

Main Results:

Holistic processing showed comparable magnitude for both hemispheres in the identification task.
An alignment-dependent performance decrease was observed for stimuli in the left visual field during the matching task, but not the right.
These findings suggest right hemisphere dominance in early holistic processing stages.

Conclusions:

The right hemisphere appears to dominate early stages of holistic face processing, as indicated by the composite face effect in a matching task.
Later face identification and naming processes utilize unified representations, independent of input lateralization.
The composite face effect might involve different representations depending on whether it's measured in matching or identification tasks.