Search

Many models of face recognition incorporate the idea of a face recognition unit (FRU), an abstracted representation formed from each experience of a face which aids recognition under novel viewing conditions. Some previous studies have failed to find evidence of this FRU representation. Here, we report three experiments which investigated this theoretical construct by modifying the face learning procedure from that in previous work. During learning, one or two views of previously unfamiliar faces were shown to participants in a serial matching task. Later, participants attempted to recognize both seen and novel views of the learned faces (recognition phase). Experiment 1 tested participants' recognition of a novel view, a day after learning. Experiment 2 was identical, but tested participants on the same day as learning. Experiment 3 repeated Experiment 1, but tested participants on a novel view that was outside the rotation of those views learned. Results revealed a significant advantage, across all experiments, for recognizing a novel view when two views had been learned compared to single view learning. The observed view invariance supports the notion that an FRU representation is established during multi-view face learning under particular learning conditions.

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is commonly associated with the failure to properly perceive individuating facial properties, notably those conveying configural or holistic content. While this may indicate that the primary impairment is perceptual, it is conceivable that some cases of DP are instead caused by a memory impairment, with any perceptual complaint merely allied rather than causal. To investigate this possibility, we administered a battery of face perception tasks to 11 individuals who reported that their face recognition difficulties disrupt daily activity and who also performed poorly on two formal tests of face recognition. Group statistics identified, relative to age- and gender-matched controls, difficulties in apprehending global-local relations and the holistic properties of faces, and in matching across viewpoints, but these were mild in nature and were not consistently evident at the level of individual participants. Six of the 11 individuals failed to show any evidence of perceptual impairment. In the remaining five individuals, no single perceptual deficit, or combination of deficits, was necessary or sufficient for poor recognition performance. These data suggest that some cases of DP are better explained by a memorial rather than perceptual deficit, and highlight the relevance of the apperceptive/associative distinction more commonly applied to the allied syndrome of acquired prosopagnosia.

Since the 1970s there has been a continuing interest in how people recognise familiar faces (Bruce, 1979; Ellis, 1975). This work has complemented investigations of how unfamiliar faces are processed and the findings from these two strands of research have given rise to accounts that propose qualitatively different forms of representation for familiar and unfamiliar faces. Evidence to suggest that we process familiar and unfamiliar faces in different ways is available from cognitive neuropsychology, brain scanning, and psychophysics. However, in this review we focus on the evidence, available from experimental investigations of how people recognise faces, for different types of representation existing for each type of face. Factors affecting recognition are evaluated in terms of how they apply to familiar and unfamiliar faces and categorised according to the nature of their impact. In the final section this evidence, along with recent advances in the field, is used to explore the way in which unfamiliar faces may become familiar and the factors that may be important for the development of familiar face representations.

The face-processing skills of people with schizophrenia were compared with those of a group of unimpaired individuals. Participants were asked to make speeded face-classification decisions to faces previously rated as being typical or distinctive. The schizophrenic group responded more slowly than the unimpaired group; however, both groups demonstrated the customary sensitivity to the distinctiveness of the face stimuli. Face-classification latencies made to typical faces were shorter than those made to distinctive faces. The implication of this finding with the schizophrenic group is discussed with reference to accounts of face-processing deficits attributed to these individuals.

The ability to recognize individual faces is of crucial social importance for humans and evolutionarily necessary for survival. Consequently, faces may be "special" stimuli, for which we have developed unique modular perceptual and recognition processes. Some of the strongest evidence for face processing being modular comes from cases of prosopagnosia, where patients are unable to recognize faces whilst retaining the ability to recognize other objects. Here we present the case of an acquired prosopagnosic whose poor recognition was linked to a perceptual impairment in face processing. Despite this, she had intact object recognition, even at a subordinate level. She also showed a normal ability to learn and to generalize learning of nonfacial exemplars differing in the nature and arrangement of their parts, along with impaired learning and generalization of facial exemplars. The case provides evidence for modular perceptual processes for faces.

Two experiments examined repetition priming on tasks that require access to semantic (or biographical) information from faces. In the second stage of each experiment, participants made either a nationality or an occupation decision to faces of celebrities, and, in the first stage, they made either the same or a different decision to faces (in Experiment 1) or the same or a different decision to printed names (in Experiment 2). All combinations of priming and test tasks produced clear repetition effects, which occurred irrespective of whether the decisions made were positive or negative. Same-domain (face-to-face) repetition priming was larger than cross-domain (name-to-face) priming, and priming was larger when the two tasks were the same. It is discussed how these findings are more readily accommodated by the Burton, Bruce, and Johnston (1990) model of face recognition than by episode-based accounts of repetition priming.

We report an experiment in which participants made gender judgments (male or female) to faces. There were three groups of faces: unfamiliar, familiar (celebrities), and a set which had been learned earlier by the participants during the experimental session. The principal purpose of this study was to establish an indirect measure of assessing whether faces have become familiar through learning that does not require overt recognition. Bruce and Young's (1986 British Journal of Psychology 77 305-327) model of face recognition suggests face-processing tasks are independent of one another and so familiarity should have no impact on the time taken to perform gender decisions. However, recent studies have suggested that some face processes are not completely independent. A gender judgment is a simple task which would be useful in face-learning experiments. We examined whether exposure to previously novel faces facilitates a later gender decision to those faces. During a learning stage, participants viewed a set of unfamiliar faces. At test, participants were able to assign gender faster to previously familiar (famous) faces and learned faces than they were to unfamiliar faces. Therefore familiarity can influence the speed at which gender is analysed. We explain our findings with reference to the Burton et al (1990 British Journal of Psychology 81 361-380) interactive activation and competition (IAC) model of face recognition and discuss how the gender judgment might be employed as a means of tracking the acquisition of familiarity in face-learning studies.

An experiment is reported in which participants matched complete images of unfamiliar, moderately familiar, and highly familiar faces with simultaneously presented images of internal and external features. Participants had to decide if the two images depicted same or different individuals. Matches to internal features were made faster to highly familiar faces than both to moderately familiar and to unfamiliar faces, and matches to moderately familiar faces were made faster than to unfamiliar faces. For external feature matches, this advantage was only found for "different" decision matches to highly familiar faces compared to unfamiliar faces. The results indicate that the differences in familiar and unfamiliar face processing are not the result of all-or-none effects, but seem to have a graded impact on matching performance. These findings extend the earlier work of Young et al (1985 Perception 14 737-746), and we discuss the possibility of using the matching task as an indirect measure of face familiarity.

Two experiments examined the graded similarity effect in the repetition priming of familiar face recognition. From the model of repetition priming proposed by Burton, Bruce, and Johnston (1990) it was predicted that similarity effects may be a confound of stimulus preparation. Experiment 1 was used to discount this hypothesis, but failed to replicate a pattern of graded priming related to the similarity of prime and target faces. Experiment 2 attempted a more extensive investigation using two different measures of prime-target similarity. The results replicated Ellis, Young, Flude, and Hay's (1987) finding that similar primes confer more priming than dissimilar ones, but found no correlation between amount of priming and the degree of prime-target resemblance for either similarity metric used. In view of these findings the mechanism of repetition priming in familiar face recognition is discussed.

Contemporary models of face recognition explain everyday difficulties in name retrieval by proposing that name information can only be accessed after semantic information (e.g. Bruce & Young, 1986) or by proposing an architecture which puts name retrieval at a disadvantage (e.g. Burton & Bruce, 1992). Experiments reported here examined the time required to access name and semantic details by adult and child subjects. In Experiment 1 adult subjects took more time to match familiar faces to names than to other semantic details (e.g. occupation), a finding consistent with all the previous literature on name retrieval. Experiment 2, however, showed that the youngest subjects were significantly faster in matching familiar faces to names than to semantic details. Experiment 3 also showed that children were faster at accessing names than occupations when giving vocal responses to presentations of familiar faces. These findings are not predicted by rigidly sequential models of face recognition and are discussed with specific reference to the ontogenesis of models based on a more flexible connectionist architecture.

In this paper we describe how the microstructure of the Bruce & Young (1986) functional model of face recognition may be explored and extended using an interactive activation implementation. A simulation of the recognition of familiarity of individuals is developed which accounts for a range of published findings on the effects of semantic priming, repetition priming and distinctiveness. Finally, we offer some speculative predictions made by the model, and point to an empirical programme of research which it suggests.