Global precedence

In one type of task, participants are told before the presentation of the stimulus whether to focus on a global or local level, and their accuracy and reaction times are recorded.

In this condition, experimenters note which of the two visuals, the global or local, is chosen to match the target stimulus.

[5] The inclination towards global precedence is also evident in second generation Asian-Australians, but the correlation is weaker than that of recent immigrants.

[5] The tendency of Caucasians to process information "analytically" and Asians "holistically" has also been attributed to differences in brain structure.

Especially in experiments involving spatially distributed stimuli, neglected racial or cultural differences in visual perception could skew results.

[4] In other words, when the global object is meaningful, the reaction time for identification of the local feature increases.

[7] Younger children respond slower to different types of stimuli compared to older children, and thus local precedence seems more prevalent than global precedence in perceptual organization, at least until adolescence, when the transition to globally oriented visual perception begins.

[7] The ability to encode a global shape, which is necessary for efficiently recognizing and identifying objects, increases with age.

This suggests neuropsychological factors behind global precedence decline in there may be faster aging in the right than the left hemisphere.

[8] Studies regarding mood have shown that positive and negative cues can influence global versus local attention during image-based tasks.

[11] Positive affect does not simply promote local processing, but rather improves one’s abilities in his non-preferred dimension.

This indicates that facial recognition depends on type of attention, automatic or controlled, rather than focus on global or local features.

Stronger global precedence should show a greater decrease in accuracy of identification of inverted faces because the task relies on local processing.

The degree of global precedence one demonstrates has been found to differ in relation to the variable of an individual's field dependence.

[15] Neuropsychological evidence based on PET scans suggests that the global aspect of visual situations activates and is processed preferentially by the right hemisphere, whereas the local aspect of visual situations activates and is processed preferentially by the left hemisphere.

[16] The classical view of Gestalt psychology also suggests the right hemisphere is involved in the perception of wholes and thus plays a stronger role in global processing, whereas the left hemisphere involves separate local elements and therefore plays a stronger role in local processing.

[16] The Navon figure has been used in relating theories regarding processing to assessing cognitive learning disabilities, such as developmental dyslexia, dyscalculia, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, and autism.

These developmental learning disabilities do not cause general problems with identifying symbols to their mental representations, but rather create specific challenges.

[18] This is likely because individuals with OCPD characteristically have sharp, detail-oriented attentions, and tend to focus more on specifics rather than the larger context.

[18] There are correlations between global or local performance on a task and the abilities to identify emotion and canine age for autistic children.