RECOGNITION OF BRIEFLY PRESENTED FAMILIAR AND UNFAMILIAR FACES

Abstract

Early processing stages in the perception of familiar and unfamiliarfaces were studied in four experiments by varying the type of available facialinformation in a four alternative forced choice recognition task. Both reactiontime and recognition accuracy served as dependent measures. The observeddata revealed an asymmetry in processing familiar and unfamiliar faces. Amarkedly weak inversion effect and strong blurring effect suggest a limitedusage of spatial relations within early processing stages of unfamiliar faces.Recognition performance for whole familiar faces did not deteriorate due toblurring or the presentation of isolated internal features, suggesting a low levelof representation for featural properties of familiar faces. Based on the data wepropose that recognition of familiar faces relies much more on spatial relationsamong features, particularly internal features, than on featural characteristics. Incontrast, recognition of unfamiliar faces resorts mainly to featural information.

Keywords

• features and configuration in faces
• face familiarity
• face recognition