Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Categorical perception (CP) facilitates the discrimination of stimuli belonging to different categories relative to those from the same category. Effects of CP on the discrimination of color and shape have been attributed to the top-down modulation of visual perception by the left-lateralized language processes. We used a divided visual field (DVF) search paradigm to investigate the prospective effects of CP for face identity and gender processing. Consistent with visual processing of face identity in the right hemisphere, we found CP facilitated perception only in the left visual field (LVF). In contrast, and consistent with language-induced CP, we observed a between-category advantage for processing face gender only in the right visual field (RVF). Taken together, our results suggest that language-induced CP plays a role in the category-based visual processing of faces by the left hemisphere, but face familiarity processing might be dependent on different, identity-specialized networks in the right hemisphere.