Composite Schematic Faces are Processed Analytically

In contrast to claims of holistic processing, upright aligned composite face morphs were recently shown to be processed in the same manner as inverted or misaligned composite face morphs (Cheng et al., 2018). In the present paper, we replicate that work, using a set of schematic faces, which vary second-order features (e.g., lip height and eye separation) in the top and bottom-halves of the schematic face. As for morph faces, we find that processing for upright, inverted, aligned and misaligned faces is consistent with a mixture of serial and parallel processing. These results remain consistent with the idea that composite faces are not processed differently from other objects with separable dimensions.