Face perception is considered to be evolutionarily adaptive and conserved across species. While subcortical visual brain areas are implicated in face perception based on existing evidence from phylogenetic and ontogenetic studies, whether these subcortical structures contribute to more complex visual computations such as the holistic processing (HP) of faces in humans is unknown. To address this issue, we used a well-established marker of HP, the composite face effect (CFE), with a group of adult human observers, and presented two sequential faces in a trial monocularly or interocularly using a Wheatstone stereoscope. HP refers to the finding that two identical top (or bottom) halves of a face are judged to be different when their task-irrelevant bottom (or top) halves belong to different faces. Because humans process faces holistically, they are unable to ignore the information from the irrelevant half of the composite face, and this is true to an even greater extent when the two halves of the faces are aligned compared with when they are misaligned (‘Alignment effect’). The results revealed the HP effect and also uncovered the Alignment effect, a key marker of the CFE. The findings also indicated a monocular advantage, replicating the known subcortical contribution to face perception. There was, however, no statistically significant difference in the CFE when the images were presented in the monocular versus interocular conditions. These findings indicate that HP is not necessarily mediated by the subcortical visual pathway, and suggest that further investigation of cortical, rather than subcortical, structures might advance our understanding of HP and its role in face processing.

面部感知被认为是跨物种进化适应性和保守的。虽然基于系统发育和个体发育研究的现有证据，皮层下视觉大脑区域与面部感知有关，但这些皮层下结构是否有助于更复杂的视觉计算，例如人类面部的整体处理 (HP)，尚不清楚。为了解决这个问题，我们使用了一个成熟的 HP 标记，即复合面部效应 (CFE)，与一组成年人类观察者一起，并使用惠斯通立体镜在单眼或眼间试验中呈现了两个连续的面孔。HP 指的是当与任务无关的下半部分（或上半部分）属于不同的脸时，两个相同的上半部分（或下半部分）被判断为不同的发现。因为人类的处理过程是整体的，他们无法忽略来自合成面不相关的一半的信息，当两半面对齐时，与它们未对齐时相比，这在更大程度上是正确的（“对齐效应”）。结果揭示了 HP 效应，还揭示了 CFE 的关键标志 Alignment 效应。研究结果还表明了单眼优势，复制了已知的皮层下对面部感知的贡献。然而，当图像以单眼与眼间条件呈现时，CFE 没有统计学上的显着差异。这些发现表明，HP 不一定由皮层下视觉通路介导，并建议进一步研究皮层，而不是皮层下，