…turns out that I have been told to consider a THIRD paper to be essentially accepted, even though I have not yet received the official letter. And because three papers in two days seems like a great feat, I am counting it even though I am being careful and not announcing the actual paper yet (Editors:  we have several papers under review now, feel free to compete for that third slot!).

Richler, J.J. & Gauthier, I. (in press). A meta-analysis and review of holistic processing. Psychological Bulletin.PDF

Sat May 17 12:45 pm. Individual differences brown bag.
Measurement of holistic processing for individual differences study
Isabel Gauthier, Jennifer J. Richler, David A. Ross

There is growing interest in the study of individual differences in face recognition, including one of its hallmarks, holistic processing, which can be defined as a failure of selective attention to parts, as measured in the composite task. We investigate the reliability of composite task measurements in eight datasets from five different samples of subjects (160 trials in each case; Ross, Richler and Gauthier, under review). Reliability was fairly low with substantial variability across experiments, with the highest reliability (.50-.67) using methods designed to increase reliability. Unlike DeGutis et al (2013), we do not find that regressing out the control condition (misaligned face halves) consistently produced more reliable results than subtracting it, although we agree subtraction is not ideal theoretically. Based on a recent meta-analysis (39 studies, N=1223), we find that the correlation between the congruency effects in the experimental (aligned) and control (misaligned) conditions is low, r = 24 (95% CI: .16, .32). We argue that for the purpose of individual differences analyses, when dealing with upright faces in samples of normal adult subjects, reliability can be maximized by collecting more data from aligned trials. Under such conditions, there is little need to regress out results in a control condition that shares very little variance with the aligned condition in the first place.

(#33.574)  Does acquisition of holistic processing for novel objects depend on experience with diagnostic parts?
C Kao-Wei, J Richler, I Gauthier
(Session: Face perception: Whole and parts – 8:30AM Sun May 18 – Poster Presentation)

– note that the abstract we submitted was based on analyses that included a small error which, when fixed, made a very important difference! Also, the first author is Kao-Wei Chua.

(#33.577)  Holistic processing of faces in the composite task depends on size
D Ross, I Gauthier
(Session: Face perception: Whole and parts – 8:30AM Sun May 18 – Poster Presentation)

(#43.511)  Measurement of semantic knowledge of object categories: Creating the Semantic Vanderbilt Expertise Test (SVET)
A Van Gulick, I Gauthier
(Session: Face perception: Experience, learning and expertise 1 – 8:30AM Mon May 19 – Poster Presentation)

(#43.513)  Gender effects for toy faces reveal qualitative differences in face processing strategies
K Ryan, I Gauthier
(Session: Face perception: Experience, learning and expertise 1 – 8:30AM Mon May 19 – Poster Presentation)