<p>Poster Title: Holistic processing of postural body configuration across different identities</p><p>Subject area: Visual perception, Body perception, High-level processing</p><p>Abstract [50 words max.]: Recent studies suggest that human bodies of conspecifics are visually processed via holistic strategies but have mainly focussed on mere standing body stimuli. The current study explored via the composite task whether other body postures are holistically processed. We show that body postures are processed holistically even when different identities are used.</p><p>Supporting summary: [500 words max., plain text]: Studies regarding the visual processing of human bodies have suggested that not just mere standing bodies in identity-based matching, but also other body postures (e.g., Reed, Stone, Bozova, & Tanaka, 2003; Reed, Stone, Grubb, & McGoldrick, 2006; Tao & Sun, 2013) are susceptible to a holistic processing strategy. Recently, we (Willems, Vrancken, Germeys, & Verfaillie, 2014) explored whether human body postures are processed holistically by using the composite design originally suggested by Young, Hellawell, and Hay (1987). In the original task of Young and colleagues (1987), participants had to decide whether two top halves of a face were the same, while ignoring the bottom face halves. A composite effect for faces was observed as a decreased discrimination performance when two identical top halves of a face were combined with different bottom face halves. The fact that the task-irrelevant face half was able to influence the perceived identity of the top half, has been seen as evidence for holistic processing (i.e., processing of the stimulus as a whole rather than processing of decomposed parts). Recent studies adapted the paradigm to be used with body stimuli (Robbins & Coltheart, 2012; Soria-Bauser, Suchan, & Daum, 2011) and used a traditional identity-based task. However, the body composite effect has recently been applied to a whole range of body postures (Willems, et al., 2014). Unfortunately, there has been some debate whether the original composite design is suitable to measure holistic processing (e.g., Richler & Gauthier, 2013; Rossion, 2013). Furthermore, a posture-based task in which the same model is used throughout a trial, might be susceptible to alternative low and mid-level strategies like limb-angles and shading differences. As such, the current study implements the proposed alternative to the composite effect (i.e., a composite paradigm in which response congruency is taken into account on top of the traditional alignment-based composite effect) and the use of different models within a trial while still using a posture-based task. Results of our study indicate that the holistic processing of body postures still occurs, even when two different models are used. </p><p>(Co-)Author information:</p><p>Willems Sam Faculty of Psychology & Educational Sciences, Experimental Psychology University of Leuven [email protected] URL: http://www.kuleuven.be/wieiswie/nl/person/00079329 </p><p>Fierens Barbara Faculty of Psychology & Educational Sciences, Experimental Psychology University of Leuven [email protected] Karl Verfaillie Faculty of Psychology & Educational Sciences, Experimental Psychology University of Leuven [email protected] URL: http://www.kuleuven.be/wieiswie/nl/person/00002342 </p><p>Reed, C. L., Stone, V. E., Bozova, S., & Tanaka, J. (2003). The body-inversion effect. Psychological Science, 14(4), 302-308. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.14431 Reed, C. L., Stone, V. E., Grubb, J. D., & McGoldrick, J. E. (2006). Turning configural processing upside down: Part and whole body postures. Journal of Experimental Psychology-Human Perception and Performance, 32(1), 73-87. doi: 10.1037/0096-1523.32.1.73 Richler, J. J., & Gauthier, I. (2013). When intuition fails to align with data: A reply to Rossion (2013). Visual Cognition, 21(2), 254-276. doi: 10.1080/13506285.2013.796035 Robbins, R., & Coltheart, M. (2012). Left-right holistic integration of human bodies. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65(10), 1962-1974. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2012.674145 Rossion, B. (2013). The composite face illusion: A whole window into our understanding of holistic face perception. Visual Cognition, 21(2), 139-253. doi: 10.1080/13506285.2013.772929 Soria-Bauser, D. A., Suchan, B., & Daum, I. (2011). Differences between perception of human faces and body shapes: Evidence from the composite illusion. Vision Research, 51(1), 195-202. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2010.11.007 Tao, W., & Sun, H. (2013). Configural processing in body posture recognition: an eye-tracking study. Neuroreport, 24(16), 903-910. doi: 10.1097/wnr.0000000000000017 Willems, S., Vrancken, L., Germeys, F., & Verfaillie, K. (2014). Holistic processing of human body postures: Evidence from the composite effect. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00618 Young, A. W., Hellawell, D., & Hay, D. C. (1987). Configurational information in face perception. Perception, 16(6), 747-759. doi: 10.1068/p160747</p>