6533b828fe1ef96bd12885ce

RESEARCH PRODUCT

The context congruency effect is face specific

subject

description

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.