P SY CH OL OG I C AL S CIE N CE

Research Article

Holistic Processing Is Finely
Tuned for Faces of One’s Own
Race
Caroline Michel,1 Bruno Rossion,1 Jaehyun Han,2 Chan-Sup Chung,2 and Roberto Caldara3
1

Unite´ Cognition et De´veloppement and Laboratoire de Neurophysiologie, Universite´ Catholique de Louvain,
Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium; 2Center for Cognitive Science, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea; and3
Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT—Recognizing individual faces outside one’s race

poses difficulty, a phenomenon known as the other-race
effect. Most researchers agree that this effect results fromdifferential experience with same-race (SR) and otherrace (OR) faces. However, the specific processes that develop with visual experience and underlie the other-race
effect remain to be clarified. We tested whether the integration of facial features into a whole representation—
holistic processing—was larger for SR than OR faces in
Caucasians and Asians without life experience with OR
faces. For both classes of participants, recognition of
the upper half of a composite-face stimulus was more disrupted by the bottom half (the composite-face effect) for SR
than OR faces, demonstrating that SR faces are processedmore holistically than OR faces. This differential holistic
processing for faces of different races, probably a byproduct of visual experience, may be a critical factor in theother-race effect.
People are better at discriminating and recognizing faces of theirown race than faces of a different race, a phenomenon confirmed
experimentally and termed the other-race effect (ORE) for faceperception (for a meta-analysis, see Meissner & Brigham, 2001).
Most researchers agree that the ORE results from the differential
experience people have with same-race (SR) and other-race(OR) faces (e.g., Rhodes, Tan, Brake, & Taylor, 1989; Sangrigoli,
Pallier, Argenti, Ventureyra, & de Schonen, 2005), but the
specific processes that develop with visual experience and lead
Address correspondence to Bruno Rossion, Unité Cognition etDéveloppement, Université Catholique de Louvain, 10 Place duCardinal Mercier, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, e-mail: bruno.
rossion@psp.ucl.ac.be.

608

to the differential ability to recognize SR and OR faces remain
to be clarified.
An important question related to this issue is whether different visual cues are extracted from SR and OR faces. Researchers have proposed that the face-processing system is lesssensitive to the spatial relations between features in OR faces
than in SR faces (Rhodes et al., 1989). In previous studies, thishypothesis was tested only indirectly—by comparing recognition of upright and upside-down faces, because the decreasein performance for upside-down faces (the face-inversion effect;
Yin, 1969) appears to be due mainly to a loss of the ability to
extract such spatial, or configural, relationships (e.g., Freire,
Lee, & Symons, 2000; Rhodes, Brake, & Atkinson, 1993).
Moreover, the prediction of a larger face-inversion effect for SR
faces relative to OR faces has not been clearly supported:
Whereas Rhodes et al. (1989; see also Sangrigoli & de Schonen,2004) found a larger effect for SR than for OR faces, other researchers have observed a larger effect for OR than SR faces(Valentine & Bruce, 1986) or an equally large effect for the twocategories of faces (Buckhout & Regan, 1988). Fallshore andSchooler (1995) also provided some indirect support for theconfigural hypothesis, by showing that SR face recognition was
more impaired by verbal description of the faces (an effectcalled verbal overshadowing) than was OR face recognition.
Starting from the premise that verbalization disrupts essentiallythe nonreportable configural processing of faces, the authorsinterpreted this differential verbal overshadowing as evidence ofbetter configural processing for SR than OR faces.
More recently, Tanaka, Kiefer, and Bukach (2004) showed agreater whole-part advantage (i.e., a benefit from the whole facecontext when processing facial parts; Tanaka & Farah, 1993) for
SR than OR faces among Caucasian subjects, a result suggestingthat SR faces are perceived more holistically (as a whole or a

Copyright r 2006 Association for Psychological Science

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C. Michel et al.

template) than OR faces. However, in contrast to the Caucasiansubjects, who had no experience with Asian faces, the Asiansubjects in this study had been living in North America for their
entire lives and reported having more experience with Caucasian than with Asian faces. Thus, unsurprisingly, the Asianparticipants showed equally large holistic processing for SR and
OR (Caucasian) faces, so the authors could not conclude unequivocally that their results showed differential holistic
processing for SR and OR faces. Moreover, no independentmeasure of the ORE was reported in this study. Another limitation of this work (see also Michel, Caldara, & Rossion, 2004) isrelated to the ambiguity of the locus of the whole-to-part interference during this task. The whole-part advantage may be due
to criterion shifts rather than to improvement in sensitivity whena feature is presented in its context. This would suggest that
subjects are not processing faces at a holistic level perceptually,
but instead are using information from other features to alter
their decision (Wenger & Ingvalson, 2002). Given that in thewhole-part paradigm, subjects receive no specific instructions
about which part or parts of the stimulus to attend, Caucasianparticipants may show less contextual effect when presented
with Asian faces than when presented with Caucasian faces
because they choose to base their decisions for Asian faces on asingle feature, whereas they take into account several features
for faces of their own race.
In the present study, we aimed to clarify directly and unambiguously whether SR faces are perceived more holistically than
OR faces. To do this, we used the face-composite paradigm (Young,
Hellawell, & Hay, 1987), probably the most compelling demonstration of holistic face processing (Le Grand, Mondloch, Maurer,& Brent, 2004; Maurer, Le Grand, & Mondloch, 2002), to test
subjects of different races who had no experience with OR faces.
We tested Caucasian and Asian participants who had beenborn in and were living in Western Europe and Korea, respectively. After ensuring that the two populations exhibited a clear
advantage in recognizing SR faces, we sought to determine theextent to which they perceived SR and OR faces holistically. In
the face-composite paradigm (Young et al., 1987), the top half ofa face is joined to the bottom half of another face. Observers are
slower to name the identity of the top part of the face when thebottom part (to be ignored) is aligned with the top part, creating acomposite face, than when the top and bottom parts are misaligned (i.e., offset laterally). Since its first demonstration, thiscomposite-face effect has been replicated and extended to unfamiliar faces in experiments using matching tasks (e.g., Le
Grand et al., 2004), providing compelling evidence that theperception of a novel face configuration—understood here in thesense of a gestalt—in a facial composite interferes with therecognition of its constituent parts. We predicted that the composite-face effect in a delayed matching task with unfamiliar
faces would be larger for SR than OR faces in the two groups ofparticipants. Such a result would support the hypothesis that SR
faces are perceived more holistically than OR faces.

Volume 17—Number 7

METHOD

Participants
Thirty Caucasian (Belgian; 21 females; mean age 5 22.9 years,
range: 19–29 years) and 30 Asian (Korean; 15 females; mean
age 5 20.09 years, range: 18–25 years) students took part in theexperiment. None of the participants had significant experience
with OR faces (as assessed by a questionnaire), and all had
normal or corrected-to-normal vision.

Stimuli
All the facial stimuli were full-front views of Belgian or Chinese(from Beijing) students (between 18 and 25 years old) who were
unfamiliar to the participants. The students posed with neutral
expressions, and external features were removed. The photographs subtended a visual angle of approximately 4.581 by 3.441
and were displayed on a computer screen using E-Prime 1.1.
Old/New Face Recognition Task
For the old/new face recognition task, we used 40 faces of eachrace (half males). All photographs were shown in color on a whitebackground.
Composite Task
For the composite task, 40 new faces of each race (half males)
were used as stimuli. All photographs were shown in gray scale.
The composites were created by first dividing the faces into top
and bottom segments by slicing them in the middle of the nose
(Figs. 1a and 1b). For each original face, we constructed four
composite face stimuli, two for same trials and two for different
trials (see Procedure). For the same trials, we joined the top
segment of the original face to the bottom segment of anotherface of the same gender: In one of these composites, the two
halves were aligned, and in the other, they were misaligned (bypositioning the middle of the bottom segment next to the extreme
left side of the top segment; see Figs. 1a and 1b). For the different
trials, we joined the same bottom segment used in the same trials
to the top segment from an entirely different face. Again, one ofthese stimuli was aligned, and the other was misaligned (seeFigs. 1a and 1b). Thus, the bottom part of the four composite
faces associated with each original face was always the same,and the top part was either the top segment of the original face(same trials: only the bottom part differed from the bottom part ofthe original face) or the top segment of a different face (different
trials: both top and bottom parts differed from the original face).
Stimuli were presented on a gray rectangle (6.71 by 5.161)
against a white background.

Procedure
Participants were tested individually, at a distance of 100 cm
from the computer screen.

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Holistic Perception of Same- and Other-Race Faces

Fig. 1. Examples of experimental stimuli from the composite task. The composite stimuli were created byslicing original Caucasian (a) and Asian (b) faces in the middle of the nose and then joining different top andbottom parts. For each original (target) face, four composites, all using the same bottom part from anotherface, were constructed: (1) the target’s upper part aligned with that bottom part, (2) the target’s upper part
misaligned with that bottom part, (3) a different upper part aligned with that bottom part, and (4) a different
upper part misaligned with that bottom part. The first two kinds of composites, which required a ‘‘same’’
response, were critical for the experiment.

Old/New Face Recognition Task
The ORE was measured first. Participants were presented with
20 faces of each race, one by one (3 s each, interstimulus interval 5 1 s), and were told explicitly to encode the faces inmemory. This encoding phase was followed by a forced-choicerecognition task in which 40 faces (20 old and 20 new) were
presented individually. Participants had to indicate whether
each face was an old or a new one by pressing one of two keys on
the computer keyboard. Each face remained on the computer
screen until the participant’s response, or for a maximum of 2 s.
Participants did not know the ratio of old to new faces and did notreceive any feedback on their responses. Faces of the two races
were presented in separate blocks, with the order of presentationfor SR and OR blocks and the response keys being counterbalanced across participants. As in previous studies (e.g., Carroo, 1986), d 0 indices (Swets, Tanner, & Birdsall, 1961) for
Caucasian and Asian faces were calculated for each participant.

decide as accurately and as quickly as possible whether theupper part of the second stimulus was the same as or different
from the upper part of the target. (Responses were made using
two keys, with mapping of key to response counterbalanced
across participants.) After 8 practice trials, four blocks of 70
trials were presented. Each block contained 35 trials with Asianfaces and 35 trials with Caucasian faces, presented randomly,
with an interstimulus interval of 1 s. For each race, 20 trials
required a ‘‘same’’ decision, and the remaining 15 required a‘‘different’’ decision. As a result, a total of 160 same trials and
120 different trials were presented. This bias, equal for thealigned and misaligned conditions and for the two races offaces, was introduced because only same trials were of interestfor the purposes of our study, the composite effect being assessed by the difference in performance between the misaligned and the aligned conditions for same trials (Le Grandet al., 2004).

Composite Task
Each trial began with the presentation of a 300-ms fixation crossat the center of the computer screen. The fixation cross wasfollowed by a blank screen for 200 ms and then a target face for
600 ms. After a 300-ms blank screen, a second stimulus waspresented until response, or for a maximum of 1 s. In each trial,
the target was an original face, and the second stimulus was oneof the four corresponding composite faces (Figs. 1a and 1b).
Participants were instructed to ignore the lower parts and to

RESULTS610

The ORE: Old/New Face Recognition Task
Both Caucasian and Asian participants were much better atrecognizing SR than OR faces (Fig. 2a), as shown by the significant interaction between race of participant and race of face,F(1, 58) 5 24.03, prep 5 .99, Z2 5 .29. Mean d 0 values for
Caucasian participants were 2.2 and 1.34 for Caucasian andAsian faces, respectively, post hoc t(29) 5 4.42, prep 5 .99. For

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C. Michel et al.

Fig. 2. Results from the old/new face recognition test: d 0 scores (a) and
response times for correct trials (b) as a function of race of face and race ofparticipant. Error bars indicate standard errors of the mean.

Asian participants, mean d 0 values were 1.22 and 2.06 for
Caucasian and Asian faces, respectively, post hoc t(29) 5 2.93,
prep 5 .96. Neither the main effect of race of participant nor themain effect of race of face was significant, F(1, 58) 5 0.24 and0.002, respectively.
A similar pattern was found for correct response times (RTs):
Both Asian and Caucasian participants were faster at recognizing SR than OR faces (Fig. 2b), as revealed by the highly
significant crossover interaction between race of participant andrace of face, F(1, 58) 5 18.20, prep 5 .99, Z2 5 .24. Main effects
were not significant, F(1, 58) 5 1.67 and 2.18 for race of participant and race of face, respectively ( p > .1). Mean RTs of
Caucasian participants were 968 ms and 1,008 ms for Caucasianand Asian faces, respectively, post hoc t(29) 5 2.03, prep 5 .87.
Among Asian participants, mean RTs were 971 ms and 896 ms
for Caucasian and Asian faces, respectively, post hoc t(29) 5
4.08, prep 5 .99.

Holistic Processing of SR and OR Faces
Accuracy
Subjects were more accurate on misaligned than aligned same
trials, showing a composite-face effect, F(1, 58) 5 44.88, prep 5

Volume 17—Number 7.99, Z2 5 .44.1 Critically, the three-way interaction among raceof participant, race of face, and alignment of the parts was highly
significant, F(1, 58) 5 12.47, prep 5 .98, Z2 5 .18. As expected,
Caucasian participants exhibited a larger composite effect (i.e.,a larger difference between the misaligned and aligned conditions) for Caucasian as compared with Asian faces (Fig. 3a),t(29) 5 3.30, prep 5 .97. Subsequent t tests revealed that they
exhibited a significant composite effect for Caucasian faces,t(29) 5 5.75, prep 5 .99, but not for Asian faces, t(29) 5 1.46,
n.s. Among Asian participants, the composite-face effect wassignificant for both Caucasian faces, t(29) 5 4.04, prep 5 .99,
and Asian faces, t(29) 5 5.71, prep 5 .99, but it was marginallylarger for Asian faces, t(29) 5 1.61, prep 5 .86 (Fig. 3b).
Although simple effects should be interpreted with caution in
the presence of a significant interaction, direct comparisons
between Caucasian and Asian faces revealed that Caucasianparticipants were better at matching the top parts of misaligned
Caucasian faces than at matching the top parts of misaligned
Asian faces, t(29) 5 6.30, prep 5 .99 (Fig. 3a). However, in thealigned condition, Caucasian participants’ accuracy did not
differ between Caucasian and Asian faces, t(29) 5 0.07, n.s.
(Fig. 3a), because of the larger interference caused by thealignment of the two parts in Caucasian faces. For Asian participants, there was no difference between Asian and Caucasian
faces in the misaligned condition to start with, t(29) 5 1.09, n.s.
(Fig. 3b). Consequently, there was a significant difference infavor of Caucasian faces in the aligned condition, t(29) 5 2.87,
prep 5 .95, because of the larger interference for Asian faces.
RTs
There was also a general composite-face effect in correct RTs,
F(1, 58) 5 106.9, prep 5 .99, Z2 5 .65, participants being fasteron misaligned trials than on aligned trials (Fig. 4). The three-way
interaction of interest was marginally significant, F(1, 58) 5
3.85, prep 5 .87, Z2 5 .06. Caucasian participants were fasterfor misaligned than aligned faces, whether the faces were
Caucasian, t(29) 5 5.17, prep 5 .99, or Asian, t(29) 5 3.415,
prep 5 .98, and there was no statistical difference between thetwo races of faces, t(29) 5 1.08. Asian participants were also
faster for misaligned than aligned faces, whether the faces were
Caucasian, t(29) 5 6.76, prep 5 .99, or Asian, t(29) 5 9.89,
prep 5 .99, but for these participants, the composite-face effectwas larger for Asian than Caucasian faces, t(29) 5 1.81,
prep 5 .89.
1
Generally bad performance on OR misaligned faces could prevent an unambiguous interpretation of the difference in the composite-face effect found for
SR versus OR faces. Note, however, that performance on OR misaligned faces
was generally good on both same trials (88.2% and 93.7% correct for Caucasianand Asian subjects, respectively) and different trials (84.8% and 88.8% correct).
Moreover, a two-way analysis of variance conducted on accuracy rates for different misaligned trials showed no significant effect for either the within-subjects
factor of race of face, F(1, 58) 5 2.78, n.s., or the between-subjects factor of raceof participant, F(1, 58) 5 0.93, n.s., and no significant interaction, F(1, 58) 5
1.94, n.s.

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Holistic Perception of Same- and Other-Race Faces

Fig. 3. Results from the composite task. The graphs show accuracy for same trials among Caucasian (a) andAsian (b) participants, for both Caucasian and Asian faces. The difference between the aligned and misaligned
conditions shows the composite-face effect. Error bars indicate standard errors of the mean.

Correlation Analyses
We used correlation analyses to investigate the relation between
the ORE and the difference in the composite-face effect for SR
versus OR faces. The ORE was calculated for each participant
by subtracting the d 0 for OR faces from the d 0 for SR faces. The
differential in the composite-face effect was calculated bysubtracting the composite-face effect (percentage correct in theFig. 4. Response time (RT) difference between the aligned and misaligned
conditions as a function of race of face and race of participant. The greater
the RT difference, the greater the slowing down on aligned trials (thecomposite-face effect). Error bars indicate standard errors of the mean.

612

misaligned condition  percentage correct in the aligned condition) for OR faces from the composite-face effect for SR faces.
The differential composite-face effect was not correlated withthe amplitude of the ORE (.18, n.s., and .15, n.s., for Caucasian and Asian participants, respectively).
DISCUSSIONIn summary, we found the composite-face effect in both races ofparticipants for both races of faces, but this effect was significantly larger for SR than for OR faces, confirming the hypothesisthat SR faces are perceived more holistically than OR faces.
The gist of holistic processing of faces is that spatial relations
are quickly and efficiently extracted from the incoming visual
stimulus by means of a stored holistic facial representation(Maurer et al., 2002; Tanaka & Farah, 1993; Young et al., 1987).
The present findings provide direct evidence that the representations underlying holistic face perception are coarsely defined, being able to accommodate to faces of a different race to acertain extent. However, these representations are specificenough that holistic processing is more important for faces withwhich one has extensive visual experience, namely, SR faces.
Individuals in many societies report that members of otherraces all look alike (Feingold, 1914), and a greater ability todiscriminate among SR faces than among OR faces has been
demonstrated in numerous studies, across different racial
groups (e.g., Bothwell, Brigham, & Malpass, 1989; Meissner &Brigham, 2001). More than a century ago, Galton (1883) suggested that a face is processed as a ‘‘whole unit’’ or a Gestalt-like
representation, a proposal that has been largely demonstrated
empirically over the past two decades (e.g., Davidoff & Donnelly, 1990; Tanaka & Farah, 1993; Young et al., 1987). Integrating these findings, Rhodes et al. (1989) proposed that theVolume 17—Number 7

C. Michel et al.

ORE is due to less efficient holistic or configural coding for OR
than SR faces, but this hypothesis had not received strong empirical support before the present study. In particular, the present results provide much more compelling evidence that SR
faces are processed more holistically than OR faces than did
the previous work of Tanaka et al. (2004; see also Michel et al.,2004). This is not only because the present data were obtained in
two groups of subjects having no experience with OR faces, butalso because the paradigm used is clearer regarding the sourceof the holistic influence on the processing of face parts. In thewhole-part paradigm, subjects are given no specific instruction
about which part or parts of the stimulus to attend and encode,and they may choose to base their decisions on a single feature oron several features. In the present study, for both SR and OR
faces, participants were explicitly instructed to focus on a part of
the face stimulus, and the interference of the other part arose
automatically, when the two parts were aligned. By showing thatthe effect of alignment is larger for SR than OR faces, the present
results provide compelling evidence that SR faces are processedmore holistically than OR faces, most likely as a by-product ofvisual experience.
The amount of visual experience with OR faces is undoubtedly an important factor in the ability to recognize them (Brigham, 1986; Carroo, 1986), although it appears to be the qualityof OR contact, rather than the quantity, that is critical (Brigham,
1986; Chiroro & Valentine, 1995). Recent studies also indicatethat the ORE, which is observed as early as age 3 (Sangrigoli &de Schonen, 2004), can be reversed following subsequent experience with another race of faces (Sangrigoli et al., 2005).
These findings can be related to the role of visual experiencein shaping holistic processing. Over development, holistic
processing of faces takes over a more analytic processing,reaching mature levels by 6 years of age (Carey & Diamond,
1994; Tanaka, Kay, Grinnell, Stansfield, & Szechter, 1998), or
perhaps earlier (Pellicano & Rhodes, 2003). Moreover, it has
been demonstrated that visual experience before the age of 6months is necessary for holistic processing to develop normally(Le Grand et al., 2004). The role of visual experience in thedevelopment of holistic processing is also supported by adults’performance with nonface objects. In adults, faces are processedmore holistically than common objects (Tanaka & Farah, 1993).
However, visual expertise increases holistic processing abilities
with nonface objects (e.g., cars or ‘‘Greebles’’), as demonstrated
by studies using the composite paradigm (Gauthier, Curran,
Curby, & Collins, 2003; Gauthier & Tarr, 2002). The hypothesized relations among the ORE, visual expertise, and holistic
processing are also reinforced by neuroimaging data showingthat an area of the middle fusiform gyrus that responds preferentially to faces (Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997) is more
activated when observers match whole faces than when they
match facial parts (Rossion et al., 2000), and is more activated in
response to SR than to OR faces (Golby, Gabrieli, Chiao, &Eberhardt, 2001).

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Given that holistic processing is observed to some extent for
OR faces, our data suggest that among adults, extensive visualexperience with OR faces should lead to an increase in holistic
processing for these faces, and perhaps to better recognition ofthem. However, we did not observe significant correlations between the differential holistic processing for SR and OR faces
and the ORE in our two populations of subjects, and thus therelation between this differential holistic processing and theother-race face effect remains unclear. Although the absence ofa significant effect must be interpreted with caution, it suggeststhat the differential holistic processing between SR and OR
faces may be only one of several factors accounting for the ORE.
For instance, it may be that certain nonconfigural cues are also
more efficiently extracted from SR than from OR faces, which
could account for the results showing that Caucasian participants are better at matching the top parts of misaligned faces
when the faces are Caucasian as compared with Asian. In addition, holistic processing may be necessary but not sufficient
for adequate discrimination of individual faces, as shown by
developmental studies: Children ages 5 to 6 are relatively poorat recognizing faces (e.g., Bruce et al., 2000; Mondloch, Geldart,
Maurer, & Le Grand, 2003), even though they have acquired
mature holistic processing (Pellicano & Rhodes, 2003; Tanaka
et al., 1998). If holistic processing is necessary but not sufficient
to become a face expert, people should require less experienceto process OR faces holistically than to recognize them efficiently. Further studies will be needed to clarify the relation
between the differential holistic processing of SR and OR faces
and the ORE.
A number of researchers have proposed that the ORE iscaused by an early categorization of race (‘‘it’s an Asian’’) at theexpense of individuality (‘‘it’s Jack’’; Levin, 2000; MacLin &Malpass, 2001), rather than by an inability to generalize visualexpertise from SR faces to OR faces. According to this racecategorization view, once a face is categorized as belonging to an
OR population, it is not processed at the individual level, thelevel that is optimal for face processing and that is used bydefault with SR faces (Levin, 2000; MacLin & Malpass, 2001).
The present results are compatible with both the hypothesis that
the ORE is due to a reduced ability to process OR faces and withthe hypothesis that the ORE is due to an early categorization ofrace. However, by clearly identifying one way in which SR and
OR faces are processed differently (i.e., they differ in the degreeof holistic processing), our observations may provide means totest these different theoretical positions in future work.
Finally, in addition to showing greater holistic processing for
SR than OR faces, our results, in line with previous findings(Tanaka et al., 2004), suggest that Asians process faces more
holistically than Caucasians. Several factors, such as great exposure to Caucasian faces in the media (e.g., Hollywood movies),
may explain why Asians process Caucasian faces, in addition to
Asian faces, holistically. An interesting alternative explanation
supported by several studies, however, is that by default Asian613

Holistic Perception of Same- and Other-Race Faces

people process information more holistically (i.e., in relation to
the context) than Westerners do. This tendency has been demonstrated both in cognitive tasks (Nisbett, Pen, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001) and in perception tasks involving nonface
stimuli (Ji, Peng, & Nisbett, 2000; Kitayama, Duffy, & Larsen,
2003). In any event, this general processing difference between
races cannot fully account for the crossover interaction observed
here, which demonstrates that OR faces are processed less holistically than SR faces, most likely as a by-product of visualexperience.
Acknowledgments—We thank Sarah Houthuys for her helpfulcomments on a previous version of this article and Xiao-Hu Pengfor providing the photographs of Chinese people. This work was
supported by Grant ARC 01/06-267 from Communauté Française de Belgique–Actions de Recherche Concertées, by the
Belgian National Research Foundation, and by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
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FINAL MATERIALS RECEIVED 10/3/05)

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