Human Nature Review

This is a scholarly work that focuses on an important area in psychology and neuropsychology, which is of intrinsic interest, as I hope this review will to some degree make clear to a more general reader. I should perhaps declare my slightly peripheral research interest in it, which may explain deficiencies of insight that a reviewer working directly in this field would not have exhibited. I was looking for background information to help me predict the way the brain handles visual stimuli of different categories so that I might be able to exploit this in a study of learning connections between stimuli, and connections between these connections. The editors begin a useful introductory overview by pointing out that the distinction between “analytic” and “holistic” processes in visual perception is the contemporary version of the classic dispute between Structuralists and the Gestalt psychologists. It does not follow from this that the terms are used with much consistency, either between authors, or even within authors when referring to different domains of perception. Perhaps they are only as good as the techniques used to distinguish between them operationally, which in this book are legion. The faces, objects, and scenes of the title distinguish extraordinary feats of perceptual recognition that may depend upon different mixes of holistic and analytical processes, and involve distinguishable regions of the brain. With faces the remarkable thing is that subtle conjunctions of a limited array of features – eyes, nose, mouth etc. – which are so alike across all people, particularly within a racial group with which one is most familiar, can be used for highly reliable identification of specific individuals. With objects our ability to generalise a