Matching familiar and unfamiliar faces on internal and external features

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Human Perception

Background:

• Familiar face recognition is a complex cognitive process.
• Previous research suggests internal facial features are more salient for familiar faces.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the differential saliency of internal versus external facial features in familiar and unfamiliar face recognition.
• To determine if this saliency difference is dependent on whether stimuli are processed as faces or as specific images.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted using face matching tasks.
• Experiment 1: Participants matched complete faces with internal or external features from different photographs of the same person.
• Experiment 2: Participants matched identical photographs, allowing choices between feature-based or pictorial matching.

Main Results:

• Internal features of familiar faces were matched faster than those of unfamiliar faces (Experiment 1).
• No reaction time difference was observed for external features between familiar and unfamiliar faces.
• This advantage for familiar faces' internal features was lost when participants matched identical photographs (Experiment 2).

Conclusions:

• The enhanced processing of internal features is specific to familiar faces and occurs when stimuli are treated as faces.
• Findings support the role of structural coding over pictorial coding in familiar face recognition.