Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 14, 2026

Perceptual and Category Processing of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis' Dimension of Human Likeness: Some Methodological Issues
Published on: June 3, 2013
[Identification of familiar people viewed from a variety of viewpoints]
1Department of Psychology, Faculty of Literature, Komazawa University, Komazawa, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo 154-8525.
Abstract:
We investigated the visual information used to recognize human head from a variety of viewpoints. Subjects' task was to identify three familiar people from five different views (from the frontal face to the back of the head in steps of 45 degrees). The mean reaction time (RT) was not affected with changing head angles when the image was original face version. RT significantly decreased when the images contained in high spatial frequency (SF) component. Moreover, there was an effective SF range in recognition from each viewpoint, which was the middle range for the frontal face and the higher range for the back of the head. For the profile, there was no change in RT across the ranges of SF. These results suggest that different view-specific information was used on each view for identification, and the recognition of the profile might be unique on familiar face processing.
Related Concept Videos
Naturalistic Observations
The Representativeness Heuristic
Gestalt Principles of Perception
Parallel Processing
Prosopagnosia
Actor-Observer Effect

