Abstract
Despite their similarity as visual patterns, we can discriminate and recognize many thousands of faces. This expertise has been linked to 2 coding mechanisms: holistic integration of information across the face and adaptive coding of face identity using norms tuned by experience. Recently, individual differences in face recognition ability have been discovered and linked to differences in holistic coding. Here we show that they are also linked to individual differences in adaptive coding of face identity, measured using face identity aftereffects. Identity aftereffects correlated significantly with several measures of face-selective recognition ability. They also correlated marginally with own-race face recognition ability, suggesting a role for adaptive coding in the well-known other-race effect. More generally, these results highlight the important functional role of adaptive face-coding mechanisms in face expertise, taking us beyond the traditional focus on holistic coding mechanisms.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 897-903 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2014 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
We thank Christian Meissner for supplying Caucasian faces used in the old/new recognition tests, Rachell Barker for assistance with stimulus preparation, Ainsley Read for assistance with testing, and Mayu Nishimura and Daphne Maurer for cocreating the Robbers Game used in the Identity Aftereffects task. Ethical approval was granted by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of Western Australia.Keywords
- Face adaptation
- Face identity aftereffects
- Face recognition
- Individual differences