Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Holistic processing (HP) and right-hemispheric lateralizationboth mark expertise in visual object recognition such as faceand sub-ordinate object perception. However, counter-examples have been found recently: Experiences of selectiveattention to parts such as writing experiences in Chinesecharacters reduced HP while increased right hemispherelateralization. We investigated the association between HPand brain activities measured by event-related potentials(ERP) in participants trained to recognize artificially-createdscripts using either whole-word or grapheme-to-phonemeapproaches. Stronger N170 activities were found in bothhemispheres in both training approaches. Though the type oftraining approaches induced opposite directions incorrelations between HP and the ERP signals in the righthemisphere: In the whole-word condition, the HP effectincreased with stronger right-hemispheric N170 activities;while the direction of this correlation was reversed in thegrapheme-to-phoneme condition. This demonstrates that HPand right hemispheric lateralization are separate processesthat are associated with different perceptual mechanisms.