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. 2014 Nov 24;5(7):589-601.
doi: 10.1068/i0669. eCollection 2014.

Generalization across view in face memory and face matching

Alejandro J Estudillo  1 , Markus Bindemann  2
Affiliations

Generalization across view in face memory and face matching

Alejandro J Estudillo et al. Iperception. .

Abstract

While a change in view is considered to be one of the most damaging manipulations for facial identification, this phenomenon has been measured traditionally with tasks that confound perceptual processes with recognition memory. This study explored facial identification with a pairwise matching task to determine whether view generalization is possible when memory factors are minimised. Experiment 1 showed that the detrimental view effect in recognition memory is attenuated in face matching. Moreover, analysis of individual differences revealed that some observers can identify faces across view with perfect accuracy. This was replicated in Experiment 2, which also showed that view generalization is unaffected when only the internal facial features are shown. These results indicate that the view effect in recognition memory does not arise from data limits, whereby faces contain insufficient visual information to allow identification across views. Instead, these findings point to resource limits, within observers, that hamper such person identification in recognition memory.

Keywords: face matching; face recognition; individual differences; unfamiliar faces; view generalization.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Example face pairs, depicting identity matches (top) and mismatches (bottom) in the same (left) and different views (right).
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
The percentage of correct responses (top) and response times (bottom) for the recognition memory task and the matching task in Experiment 1. Error bars denote standard error of the mean.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Individual differences in the recognition memory task in Experiment 1, grouped by the accuracy that observers achieved.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Individual differences in the face matching task in Experiment 1, grouped by the accuracy that observers achieved.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
The percentage of correct responses (top) and response times (bottom) for the full-face and the internal feature conditions in Experiment 2. Error bars denote standard error of the mean.
Figure 6.
Figure 6.
Individual differences in the full-face condition of Experiment 2, grouped by the accuracy that observers achieved.
Figure 7.
Figure 7.
Individual differences in the internal feature condition of Experiment 2, grouped by the accuracy that observers achieved.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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