Recognition of unfamiliar faces across viewpoints

Abstract

The present study investigated two main areas of face recognition. The first aim was to provide supportive evidence for the distinctiveness/fluency account of memory dissociation. Specifically, it hoped to find that: 1) rating faces for distinctiveness elicited more remember responses, and 2) sorting faces into categories elicited more know responses. Results showed a trend consistent with these predictions but this was not significant (p=0.288), and the null hypothesis was accepted. The second aim was to find supportive evidence for the so-called ‘mid-profile’ advantage in face recognition. The mid-profile was investigated in both same-angle (i.e., same angle at study and test) and different-angle (i.e., frontal at test and mid-profile at study or vice versa) conditions. This effect was not found in the same-angle data although the results showed the expected trend (p=0.08). In the different-angle data, recognition performance was found to be significantly better when faces were studied at frontal and tested at mid-profile view than when studied at mid-profile and tested at frontal view (p<0.05). This last effect has been interpreted as showing a test-view advantage for the mid-profile perspective.