This project is a continuation of work, begun in 1998, and renewed in 2003, that investigates the general properties of phenomena that have been labeled as reflecting """"""""configural,"""""""" """"""""holistic,"""""""" and """"""""gestalt"""""""" representations and processing, with a particular emphasis on issues in facial perception and cognition. The majority of published research on these types of effects has worked from behavioral patterns to theoretical implications. This project represents a significant departure from that approach. Specifically, it involves the establishment of a set of theoretically-grounded definitions for configurality, holism, and the notion of a gestalt, and has worked from those definitions to the behavioral implications. The present proposal builds on earlier work in three important ways: (a) It provides a comprehensive analysis of the behavioral regularities that have been taken as strong indicators of configural/holistic representation and processing of human faces, (b) It extends the effort with faces to consider an analysis of a set of complex """"""""naturalistic"""""""" configural phenomena, (c) It will analyze the changes in encoded representations, and the manner in which they are processed, as observers learn to work with complex configural patterns. The project as a whole will pursue refinements to both theory and methodology, in order to go beyond our current definitions of configurality, and to extend our ability to connect theory and data. Work toward these goals will involve theoretical, methodological, and empirical efforts.
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