Boutet I., Gentes-Hawn A., & Chaudhuri A.

We examined the influence of attention on holistic face encoding using the
composite effect (Young et al., 1987). In Exp. 1, stimuli composed of a face
superimposed on a house were shown during encoding, Ss delineated either the
face or the house, thus manipulating attention away or toward the face. In Exp. 2,
an intact face image was presented with letters scrolling from top to bottom. Ss
were asked to either ignore the letters or read them. Aligned and misaligned
composite stimuli were shown at testing. We found recognition performance to
be consistently better for misaligned than aligned stimuli, regardless of the
allocation of attention during encoding. We take this as evidence that holistic
encoding is one aspect of face analysis that can be performed without attention.