Appendix.

(Abbreviations used: HP: holistic processing; CD: complete design; PD: partial design)

Claim	Reply
#2: “Holistic face processing has received several definitions that are not fundamentally different from each other.”	This is an opinion. See Richler et al. (2012) for a different opinion about various operational definitions of HP.
#16: “Part-based analytic processing is relatively well-preserved for inverted faces, but…perception of the individual face as a whole is impaired by inversion.”	See Richler, Mack et al. (2011) for data indicating that inverted faces are processed holistically, and McKone & Yovel (2009) for a review of feature inversion effects (i.e., impairment in recognition of individual features in inverted faces).
#22: “Individuation of a nonface object from another member of the same category appears to rely essentially on part-based analysis.”	The papers cited in support of this claim do not take perceptual expertise into account.
#23: “…studies that have applied the composite paradigm with nonface objects have failed to report any composite effects.”	See Bukach et al. (2010) and Wong et al.(2009a) for examples where HP was observed for non-face objects of expertise in the composite task.
#28: Holistic processing is supported by LSF (vs. HSF) information.	See Cheung et al. (2008) for evidence that HP is comparable for LSF and HSF faces in the complete design. Goffaux (2009) finds different result in a CD version that has no misaligned condition and uses simultaneous matching. Jury still out?
#38: “A recent study (Wang, Li, Fang, Tian & Liu, 2012) …isolated the face-specificity measure of face recognition performance by subtracting performance at recognizing nonface objects. The composite face effect in correct RTs correlated significantly with this face-specific measure.”	In Wang et al. the individual correlations with the PD measure of HP revealed no correlation with face recognition and a small but negative correlation with the control object task (Jia Liu, personal communication). Thus, these results support a relationship between the PD measure of HP and object processing, not face processing (see Humphreys, 1990, for a discussion of common errors in the interpretation of correlations with difference scores).
#41: “Overall, the use of the composite face illusion in fMRI indicates that faces are represented holistically in face-sensitive areas of visual cortex"”.	See Gauthier & Tarr (2002) and Wong et al. (2009b) for evidence based on the CD that nonface objects of expertise are also represented holistically in the same brain areas.
#42: “This early [N170] effect…identified the functional locus of the composite face effect at the earliest face perception stage, suggesting that facial-parts are not independently processed as face-like entities before being integrated into a holistic representation.”	This interpretation of the N170 effect cannot be directly drawn from the data. Moreover, on the timescale of neurons, 170ms is not “fast” or “early” at all: neural responses in low-level visual areas begin as rapidly as 20ms post- stimulus onset (Casagrande et al., 2005), with feedback between higher and lower visual areas occurring in less than 50ms (Pascal-Leone & Walsh, 2001).
#60: “…since participants are not aware [that there are fewer different trials], it can only increase their tendency to respond `different' for `same' trials, leading to a higher proportion of mistakes and the chance to observe more clearly the composite face effect.”	This is an opinion about how to get a particular behavioral effect, not how to investigate a perceptual phenomenon.
#61: “..if one includes many `different' trials in the study, participants might consider that in comparison to these real `different' trials, the illusory different top halves of faces do not look that different after all.”	This is an opinion about how to get a particular behavioral effect, not how to investigate a perceptual phenomenon.
#91: “…behavioral studies using these other paradigms have provided information about holistic/configural face perception that generally agrees with studies using the composite face paradigm.”	See Richler et al. (2012) for a discussion of why different measures of HP based on different definitions need not produce the same results. See Wong et al. (2010) for data showing that one of the paradigms referred to here (Thatcher illusion) is actually not face-specific.
#115: “…in the congruency/interference paradigm one cannot determine whether it is the incongruent context face half that interferes with the processing of the target face half, or if it is the congruent condition context face half that facilitates processing of the target face half”.	Interference vs. facilitation can be assessed by including isolated parts trials in the experiment (e.g., Richler, Bukach & Gauthier, 2009; Richler, Tanaka et al. 2008). See Richler, Tanaka et al. (2008) for evidence that the incongruent face half interferes with processing of the target part.
#119: “…the results of [Richler et al., 2009b] do not fully support the authors' argument (Figure 1 of that paper) and suggest a contribution of a naming response conflict.”	This claim is based only on the accuracy data, which was at ceiling. Therefore, in that paper we placed greater emphasis on the RT data (see Richler, Cheung et al., 2009).
#121: “[Richler & Gauthier] have been very critical of the misalignment manipulations in many publications, claiming that `the congruency effect provides a single measure of holistic processing without necessitating a misalignment manipulation to measure it' (Cheung et al., 2008, p. 1328).”	A misaligned condition is always necessary in the PD, and in the CD it is not necessary in the same way, as a congruency effect can be measured and interpreted for aligned stimuli. We have in fact discussed very explicitly situations where the misaligned condition in the CD is particularly important (Richler, Wong & Gauthier, 2011). This critique is also out of touch with our published work: a misalignment manipulation was included in all but 4 (Richler, Gauthier et al., 2008, Experiment 1; Richler, Tanaka et al., 2008, Experiment 2; Richler, Bukach & Gauthier, 2009, Experiment 3; Richler, Mack et al., 2009) of the 16 experiments (in nine empirical papers) using the composite task that we (G&R) have published together.
#127: “…because misaligned trials give rise to significant congruency effects at times of comparable magnitude to those observed for aligned trials, the authors claimed that misaligned faces were processed holistically (Richler et al., 2008b, experiment #1).”	This is a misrepresentation of our results and conclusions. We found that misalignment at study had no effect on HP. Misalignment at test led to significant congruency effects that were significantly smaller in magnitude than those obtained for aligned faces. Therefore, we concluded that misalignment does not eliminate, but significantly attenuates, HP.
#128: “Moreover, despite the fact that congruency effects for nonface objects (`Greebles') were equally large for aligned and misaligned stimuli (Gauthier et al., 1998; Gauthier & Tarr, 2002), these authors concluded that these nonface objects were processed holistically.”	Note that these experiments predate any formal comparison of the CD and PD. This critique focuses on a p=.05 level as a cliff, to suggest that effects were not existent in studies that were low-powered (n=10 in each case) because they were costly training studies. The focus is on effects associated with p-values of .06 and .09. The reader is invited to read the original papers, consider that effect sizes in short-term training studies are going to be smaller than for the same effects in real- world experts (as in car experts in Bukach et al., 2010). Much has been written about the perils of dichotomous thinking about significance, an interested reader could start with (Rosnow & Rosenthal, 1989).
#131: “GRC do not only include both the `same' and `different' trials: the consider an interaction between two factors…but also a main congruency effect…and an alignment effect…as evidence for holistic processing.” “The authors typically interpret all three kinds of effects instead of one”.	This is inaccurate. We have never used all three of these effects as possible places were we could find HP. Indeed, in all of our recent work (all papers published after 2009) we only measure HP using the congruency × alignment interaction (see Richler, Wong & Gauthier, 2011, for a review).
#137: Only misaligning the test face and not the study face is a methodological confound.	This is inaccurate. We only misalign faces at test because misalignment at study has been shown to produce contextual congruency effects in objects in novices (Richler, Bukach & Gauthier, 2009), but does not impact performance with faces (Richler, Tanaka et al., 2008). It is therefore an empirically motivated guard against the kind of spurious HP effects Rossion himself warns against (does he, or does he not, want us to be conservative about what we call HP?). Moreover, when we compare HP for faces to that for other object categories, or novices to experts, we use the same procedure, so this cannot account for differences we observe.
#140: “However, with the exception of one study (Cheung et al., 2008), GRC also introduced another significant modification in their congruency/interference paradigm. That is, participants have to consider both halves of the study face”.	This is inaccurate. Participants also only made judgments on top face halves in Richler, Cheung & Gauthier (2011b) and McGugin et al. (2012).
#142: If the cued part is unknown at study “the participant will certainly make more mistakes when there is an incongruent part anywhere in the second visual display presented (i.e., incongruent trials)…”	This is an opinion. See Richler, Tanaka et al. (2008, Experiment 2) for data showing no effect of congruency when the target and task- irrelevant face halves are presented side-by- side at test. In other words, participants do not make more mistakes when there is an incongruent part anywhere in the test display. Moreover, when we compare HP for faces to that for other object categories, or novices to experts, we use the same procedure, so this cannot account for differences we observe.
#143: “In the standard composite face paradigm the participant knows in advance which of the two halves…has to be encoded, and can therefore fixate gaze accordingly…If presentation time is longer, [the participant] will probably alternate between fixating one of the two halves of the study face…thus, you cannot fairly compare the effects observed when presentation duration is variable at encoding, especially when you compare conditions allowing only one fixation (e.g., 17ms to 183ms) to conditions allowing several fixations (>183ms until 800ms; Richler et al., 2009a).”	This is precisely the point of the manipulation of presentation time: to compare the magnitude of HP when there is more time available to potentially encode both object parts even though only one is relevant. Importantly, sensitivity (d') does not differ between conditions when presentation time of the study face is limited and conditions when presentation time of the test face is limited (Richler, Mack et al., 2009).
#146: The complete design has too many trials. “This is not parsimonious at all, and violates a general principle in research that one should include only the conditions in the paradigm that allow to test specific hypotheses rather than manipulate all possible variables and then expect some regularizes (`laws') to emerge.”	We resent the implication here that we manipulate “everything” and then “data mine” to find significant effects. We believe that all the trials in the CD are necessary if we want to test specific hypotheses about HP and guard against bias confounds.
#147: “Such a high number of conditions is particularly problematic when one needs to assess holistic face processing in (very) young children…or in brain-damaged patients.”	This is an opinion. In the CD, 160 trials are typically necessary to assess HP (e.g., Richler, Cheung & Gauthier, 2011a,b). In de Heering, Houthuys & Rossion (2007) children are tested on 100 trials, and in Ramon, Busigny & Rossion (2010) patients are tested on 116 trials. This hardly seems like a dramatic increase, and frankly, it seems hardly ethical to test anyone at all in measures that have demonstrated low validity.
#150: “…weaker correlation [between holistic processing and the CFMT] reported by DeGutis et al. (2013).”	This is misleading. The correlation we reported in Richler, Cheung & Gauthier (2011b) was .40; the correlation reported by Degutis et al. was .33. Moreover, this result has also been replicated in McGugin et al. (2012), where the first-order correlation was .26, and the partial correlation (factoring out age, sex, and their interactions with holistic processing) was .33.
#152: “Researchers in this field are not interested in the general processes that can drive such inter-individual correlations, but rather in what specifically differs between upright face processing, namely holistic face perception.”	Rossion seems to be confusing his own research interests with those of an entire field. A very cursory review found 16 articles published from 2010 onwards that use an individual differences approach in the study of face recognition: Avidan et al. (2011), Bukach et al. (2012), Davis et al. (2011), DeGutis et al. (2013), Dennett et al. (2011), Dennett et al. (2012), Germine et al. (2011), Konar et al. (2010), McGugin et al. (2012), Mondloch & Desjarlais (2010), Richler et al. (2011), Wang et al. (2012), Wilhelm et al. (2010), Wilmer et al. (2010), Zhou et al. (2012), Zhu et al. (2010).
#154: “…the study of Mack et al. (2011) entitled `Indecision on decisional separability' dismissed entirely the conclusions reached by Richler et al. (2008a) that holistic processing has a decisional locus.”	In Mack et al. (2011) we explained why the analysis tool developed by Kadlec & Townsend (1992) and used in Richler, Gauthier et al. (2008) is not valid. Indeed, we only used that analysis in that single paper because we discovered these issues and made them public immediately.
#159: “…Richler et al. (2009a) did not use any misaligned faces or inverted faces as a control, which makes it impossible to interpret their effects.”	This is an opinion, and the term “impossible” seems overly strong. Note also that we ourselves acknowledged this shortcoming, and addressed it in Richler, Mack et al. (2011, Experiment 2).
#163: “Inverted faces are usually presented for reasonably long durations, so that Richler et al's (2011) claim that inverted faces would not be processed holistically only at short durations is clearly inconsistent with that literature.”	This is misleading. Studies that find no HP for inverted faces presented for long durations all use the PD (or simultaneous presentation, Goffaux, 2009). It is therefore not surprising that our results using the CD are incompatible because these two designs often yield different results.
#164: “GRC's congruency/interference paradigm was initially developed to study the processing of nonface objects…and was applied only later to faces…”	This is inaccurate. The CD was first used by Farah et al. (1998) with faces.
#165: The conclusion that objects of expertise are processed holistically are only based on congruency effects (Gauthier et al, 1998; 2002; 2003).	This is inaccurate. Alignment effects are reported in Gauthier & Tarr, (2002).
#166: “[In Wong et al. 2009]…On RTs, there was a non-significant trend of an interaction between expertise, congruency and alignment…	This is rhetorical. This three-way interaction is at p=.053. See answer to claim 128. We hope that enough expertise training studies will eventually have been done that a meta- analytical approach to thinking about what is going on is possible.
#167: However, this advantage for the congruent-aligned condition was larger in novices than experts on sensitivity, pointing to a speed-accuracy trade-off in the task (Figure 5 of Wong et al., 2009)…”	Rossion is comparing the Individuation training group to the No training group and apparently suggesting that a group × congruency × alignment interaction in d' that is non-existent (F=.0004) can explain an effect in RTs (F=3.33).
#168: “This is problematic because if one aims at demonstrating that faces do not call upon specific holistic processes, the proper approach is to test visual experts with nonface object categories by means of the very same paradigm used to obtain the strongest face- specific effects in novices.”	We never aimed at demonstrating faces do not elicit special HP. Many of our studies aim at testing whether HP increases with expertise. We believe the proper approach is not to use the design that gives the “strongest” effect with faces, but the “cleanest” effect, one that can be validly associated with HP rather than response biases.