The Effects of Distinctiveness in Recognising and Classifying Faces

TLDR

Earlier research showed that distinctive familiar faces are recognised faster than typical familiar faces. In this study, distinctive faces were recognised more quickly but classified more slowly than typical faces, a pattern that held for both personally familiar and celebrity faces and suggests encoding relative to a general face prototype.

Abstract

In an earlier study it was found that distinctive familiar faces were recognised faster than typical familiar faces in a familiarity decision task. In the first experiment reported here this effect was replicated with the use of celebrities' faces rather than personally familiar faces. In the second and third experiments the effect of distinctiveness was found to reverse if the task was to distinguish between faces and jumbled faces. Subjects took longer to classify distinctive faces as faces than they did to classify typical faces. Thus distinctive faces were recognised faster, but were classified as faces more slowly than were typical faces, both when personally familiar faces and when famous faces were used as stimuli. These results are interpeted as evidence that faces are encoded by reference to a general face prototype.