Face Superiority Effect in Psychology

 

The face superiority effect refers to the way people perceive and remember faces. Instead of  perceiving and encoding the features of a face (e.g., ears, nose, eyes, mouth), we perceive and encode a human face as one holistic unit.

From Tanaka and Simonyi (2016)

It has been claimed that faces are recognized as a “whole” rather than the recognition of individual parts. In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1993, Martha Farah and I attempted to operationalize the holistic claim using the part/whole task. In this task, participants studied a face and then their memory presented in isolation and in the whole face. Consistent with the holistic view, recognition of the part was superior when tested in the whole-face condition compared to when it was tested in isolation. The “whole face” or holistic advantage was not found for faces that were inverted, or scrambled, nor for non-face objects suggesting that holistic encoding was specific to normal, intact faces.

Reference

Tanaka, J. W., & Simonyi, D. (2016). The "parts and wholes" of face recognition: A review of the literature. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), 69(10), 1876–1889. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2016.1146780

Image credit: Created by Geoffrey W. Sutton with DALL.E2 in 2023

Geoffrey W. Sutton, PhD is Emeritus Professor of Psychology. He retired from a clinical practice and was credentialed in clinical neuropsychology and psychopharmacology. His website is  www.suttong.com

 

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