Figure 4.

Holistic (composite) effects of face processing can be explained by a detection stage that obligatorily segments faces as a whole. Subjects are asked to identify the top (faces) or left (car) part of each chimera (third and fourth rows), or to simply identify the object (first and second rows). Four face (a) and car (b) stimuli are detected, projected onto holistic templates, and then identified through a winner-take-all mechanism. The numbers in the third and fourth columns indicate the result of projecting each stimulus, after detection, onto the respective templates. Aligned faces are obligatorily detected as a whole, but misaligned faces and cars are not, and therefore their attended parts can be processed independently. According to this hypothesis, the essential difference between face (a) and non-face (b) processing occurs at the detection stage (red boxes). Subsequent measurement and classification could use similar mechanisms.