Holistic and Featural Processing in the Perception of Angry and Happy Faces As Defined By Levels of Saliency and Degree of Attention

Successful human adaptation is dependent on properly recognizing fellow human facial emotions. Our psychophysical findings suggest that faces appear to be processed along a neurologically-constrained hierarchy where the emphasis between holistic versus featural processing varies depending on type of emotion, level of saliency and degree of attention.