The perception and recognition of familiar faces are thought to depend critically on an analysis of the internal features of the face. However, other studies have shown that combining highly familiar internal features with an inappropriate set of familiar external features produces a composite face whose identity is dominated by the external features. Here, we show that this illusion depends on...

How we understand the relationship between synesthetic and normal perception depends both on how we conceive of synesthetic perception and normal perception. In this paper I’ll argue that, given what we know about both, the most plausible view is that synesthesia is not a fundamentally distinct, pathological outlier relative to normal perception; rather, it is best understood as continuous with...

Face recognition in photographic positive and negative was examined in a same/different matching task in five lighting direction conditions using untextured 3-D laser-scanned faces. The lighting directions were +60, +30, 0, -30 and -60 degrees, where negative values represent bottom lighting and positive values represent top lighting. Recognition performance was better for faces in positive tha...

We hypothesized from the parasite theory of sexual selection that men (Homo sapiens) would prefer averageness and symmetry in women's faces, that women would prefer averageness and symmetry in men's faces, and that women would prefer largeness (not averageness) of the secondary sexual traits of men's faces. We generated computer images of men's and women's faces and of composites of the faces o...

Three experiments investigated the influence of level of construal (i.e., the interpretation of actions in terms of their meaning or their details) on different stages of face memory. We employed a standard multiple-face recognition paradigm, with half of the faces inverted at test. Construal level was manipulated prior to recognition (Experiment 1), during study (Experiment 2) or both (Experim...