The Effect of Personal Familiarity on the Speed of Face Recognition

While previous studies have explored the effects of familiarity on various kinds of visual face judgments, the role of familiarity in face processing is not fully understood. Here, we examine the effect of real-world personal familiarity in three simple delayed-match-to-sample tasks in which subjects were required to match faces on the basis of orientation (upright v. inverted), gender and identity. We find that subjects had a significant speed advantage with familiar faces in all three tasks, with the advantage for familiarity in the orientation case being markedly smaller than the other conditions. This indicates that real-world experience with a face exerts a powerful influence on face processing in tasks where identity information is irrelevant, even in tasks that could in principle be solved via low-level cues. These results underscore the importance of experience in shaping visual recognition processes.