Perceptibility of schematic face stimuli: Evidence for a perceptual Gestalt

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Abstract
The perceptibility of face, scrambled face and single-feature stimuli was investigated in human subjects. Stimuli were presented tachistoscopically, followed by a visual noise mask and a forced-choice test of 1 of 3 features (eyes, nose and mouth). In the 1st experiment, 2 processing strategies which have been proposed for word perception (involving expectancy and redundancy) were investigated for the stimuli employed. In the 2nd and 3rd experiments, experimentally induced familiarity was studied for its effects on recognition and perception, and an immediate and delayed perceptual test was employed. Across all 3 experiments, perception of single-feature and face stimuli were consistently superior to scrambled faces; in the 3rd experiment, differences between single features and faces were eliminated. The effects of perceptual expectancy, internal feature redundancy, familiarity and guessing biases were insufficient to account for the superiority of face to scrambled face stimuli. The perceptibility of nonredundant features was enhanced when those features were aligned in a well-defined form class. Familiarity apparently operated directly on recognitive processes but indirectly on perceptual ones.

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