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Psychology
Cognitive Psychology

Familiar faces as islands of expertise

Profile image of PJB HancockPJB Hancock

2021, Cognition

https://doi.org/10.1016/J.COGNITION.2021.104765
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Abstract

Most people recognise and match pictures of familiar faces effortlessly, while struggling to match unfamiliar face images. This has led to the suggestion that true human expertise for faces applies only to familiar faces. This paper develops that idea to propose that we have isolated 'islands of expertise' surrounding each familiar face that allow us to perform better with faces that resemble those we already know. This idea is tested in three experiments. The first shows that familiarity with a person facilitates identification of their relatives. The second shows that people are better able to remember faces that resemble someone they already know. The third shows that while prompting participants to think about resemblance at study produces a large positive effect on subsequent recognition, there is still a significant effect if there is no such prompt. Face-spaceR (Lewis, 2004) is used to illustrate a possible computational explanation of the processes involved.

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Recognition memory performance for familiar faces is better than that for unfamiliar faces. However, it is unclear whether this "familiarity effect" also occurs for unfamiliar faces which resemble familiar faces. In Experiment 1, we tested recognition memory for unfamiliar faces, and showed that unfamiliar faces that resemble familiar faces are recognized more accurately than are unfamiliar faces that do not. In Experiment 2, we attempted to measure how accurately the degree of resemblance is remembered. We had participants remember unfamiliar faces that resembled either familiar faces or unfamiliar faces. Then the participants were asked to choose the face that they thought they had seen from an array of faces whose degree of resemblance was systematically varied. The results demonstrated that resemblance to familiar faces enhances encoding of facial information, and that the degree of resemblance to familiar faces is exaggerated in memory. Experiment 3 indicated that people perceive mild anti-caricatures to be most like the real faces that are familiar to them. This finding suggests that exaggerated resemblance in memory is not due to exaggerated representations of familiar faces.

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Related topics

  • Psychology
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Expertise
  • Medicine
  • Face perception
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  • Kin Recognition
  • Psychology and Cognitive Sciences
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