Second-order facial features are processed analytically in composite faces

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 an assumption of integrality (i.e., Euclidean distance). Nevertheless, we also find that, as with morph faces, the processing of upright aligned and upright misaligned faces is consistent with a mixture of serial and parallel processing. Importantly, we found little evidence of any strong holistic pooling of the top and bottom face halves into a single object. These results remain consistent with the idea that composite faces are not processed differently from other objects with separable dimensions but instead that composite faces allow more parallel processing when aligned than when misaligned. Data and code are available from: http://github.com/knowlabUnimelb/SCHEMATICFACERULES .